Dividing up the different stages of learning can be very useful when we’re working out where we are and how far we can go. It can be a little frightening to look at the big goal – maybe professional web designer with many clients who rely on our expertise, when we’re still having difficulty remembering the names of the software we’ll be using to learn!

There are four levels of understanding. Anytime we take on something new, we all go through these levels, and realising that helps us to measure ourselves and our progress.

1. Unconscious Incompetent, 2. Conscious Incompetent, 3. Conscious Competent, 4. Unconscious Competent

Unconscious Incompetent – This is stage one where career changers often start. At this stage we know we want to change, but we don’t yet know what we don’t know, what we need to know, how to learn it or where it might take us! Sounds a bit desperate, but the main thing is knowing we want to change – everything else can be taught.

Getting advice is the essential thing for the stage one person. By talking things through with an experienced advisor, they can find out what’s involved in the process; discover where they want to go and what they need to learn.

This moves us swiftly on to stage two – Conscious Incompetent. Now we’re probably at the start of your training course. Having been taught the different options, we’ve decided on our career path, and we know what we have to learn – in other words we’re conscious of what we don’t yet know, or what we’re currently incompetent at.

It’s important to understand this, to have the wisdom of knowing where we are. Understanding conscious incompetence means that we don’t get so frustrated in our early stages of learning – we might not be very good at it (especially if it’s been a while since school…) but we know we’ll get better. Modern interactive learning accelerates this process, so we don’t have to stay at this stage for long.

Conscious Competent takes us to stage three. We’re in the flow of the learning environment, and can pick things up much more quickly. We still have to consciously think about what we’re doing on a continuous basis, but we’re able to learn competently. We’ll most likely complete our studies and successfully pass our exams during this learning stage, which will probably also extend into our working life too.

Think about learning to drive a car. We’d got to conscious competency at the time of our test – still consciously aware of every maneuver but good enough to pass the exam. It wasn’t until we gained more experience along with the knowledge that we moved into stage four.

In IT, we’ll probably be several years into our working experience before we become Unconsciously Competent. We know what we need to know, and no longer have to consciously think about why we do something. Although school’s never over for the true professional, (and certainly in IT the joy is there’s always more to learn) achieving this lofty height of understanding makes all the hard work worth it.

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