What skills to learn when you have your hands full with nappies but still want to take over the world

For Daniel Sköld.

(TL; DR: This is a matrix to help you prioritise what you should learn and when).

So much to learn, so little time.

It’s a recurring theme when I get the chance to sit down with my esteemed colleague

Daniel Sköld here at Humblebee. We’ve got barrow loads of ideas, techniques we want to learn, skills we’d like to hone… but time is our biggest enemy.

At our company we build digital services for ambitious companies. Which sounds easy enough, but behind every successful digital service is a plethora of activity. From service design to user experience to prototyping to revenue modelling to amazon web services to release planning to data analysis to organisational change to… yeh, you get my point. There’s a lot of sub-disciplines under each category. And it’s almost impossible to be an expert at everything relating to the successful launch of a digital service.

That said, it’s critical for our staff to stay on top of their game. To constantly have a sharpened set of tools in their tool box. How else do you remain a valued consultant? The days of being educated once (for 3–4 years) and “that’s it” are long gone.

A matrix for deciding what to learn

I stumbled into this matrix a while back, scribbled into a notepad, and it’s proved really useful for sorting out brain clutter when deciding what kind of education is worth while dipping into, and what can be put on pause for later.

The matrix kind of speaks for itself, but just cluster the things you want to learn where time (vertical axis) is the time you would need to invest in learning the thing, and usefulness (horizontal axis) is how useful you feel the education or skill might be in your daily work life.

Feel free to get in touch if you’re ever in the neighbourhood to chat all things digital service-ey.

Contact:
Russell Clark
e. russell.clark@humblebee.se
t. +46 (0)734 359 741
w. humblebee.se