EAs are in a position where they constantly need to upskill to keep pace with the modern world. But learning new skills and information is hard - what's the best way to do it?
Here are three ways you can make your learning efforts more effective.
You wouldn't try to eat a whole loaf of bread in one go, so why would you ever try and absorb an entire subject at once? Key to effective learning is breaking whatever it is you're trying to master into chunks. Think of the way information is broken up in a textbook - it's split into chapters, the information organised in a fashion that can be understood sequentially. If you don't have a textbook to learn from, always try and learn the fundamentals first.
Retrieving a piece of information from your memory is one of the best ways to consolidate it in place. This is why only reading notes and highlighting is a poor way to study - the information washes over you, but you don't do any mental work to really lodge it in your brain.
This is why tests can be so useful - they force you to plumb the depths of your memory to retrieve the answers. Think of it like checking whether all the books in a library are on the shelf. Only when you go to retrieve one do you find out that it might be missing. When you test, you can fix the gaps that you might not have otherwise known existed.
A big part of mastering a topic is understanding how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Even if you've mastered the individual parts, you need to understand how it all combines as a whole. One way to do this is to create a mind map that shows all the concepts and how they relate to each other.
Sometimes knowledge is multiplicative, not additive - your understanding grows proportionately more with each new thing learnt, because you begin to see the connections between the various pieces. This kind of knowledge that emerges from the interaction of other knowledge is very often the most valuable, because it's the most rare and difficult to obtain.
Expanding your knowledge base and skillset doesn't have to be a difficult chore if you know how to learn.