Personal Growth During Job Transition: Part 1 -- Learning New Skills

I was laid off from an oil and gas exploration company on April 1st of last year and have been in job search for the past fourteen months. As many of you know from personal experience, 2020 was not a banner year for senior-level hiring, and the price of oil had a multiplier effect in Houston on an already Covid-wracked labor market. Last April, retained and contingent fee recruiters were saying, “Clients have told us they won’t be hiring before Q4;” for many, come September 2020, that message had changed to "Q1 or Q2 2021."

Tempting though it might have been to watch all of Netflix, that did not seem like the highest and best use of my time. Like you, I have an inner need to contribute value: To family, friends, and the world at large. When faced with not having a job through which I could make contributions, I decided to focus on two areas (in addition to job search!) where I could take control: (1) Learning new skills and (2) Volunteer activities. This article deals with the first; my next article will deal with the second.

One of Several College-Level Educational Platforms

Since knowledge is infinite and my mastery of the universe is less so, the problem I faced with learning new skills was “What should I study?” I have many interests and have had an eclectic career when it comes to the positions I have held and the industries in which I’ve worked. I am genuinely interested in finance, law, hardware and software technology, organizational development, employee empowerment, data analytics, cybersecurity, alternative healthcare, FinTech, "sticky" marketing, futurist studies…and world peace. There are hundreds of thousands of classes available to take from home to learn new stuff, so analysis paralysis was a potential hazard.

Fortunately, I stumbled upon the edX platform early on during my Googling. The following is from Wikipedia’s summary of edX:

edX is an American massive open online course (MOOC) provider created by Harvard and MIT. It hosts online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide student body, including some courses at no charge. It also conducts research into learning based on how people use its platform. edX is a nonprofit organization and runs on the free Open edX open-source software platform.

More than 150 schools, nonprofit organizations, and corporations offer or plan to offer courses on the edX website. As of 20 July 2020, edX has around 33 million students taking more than 3,000 courses online. edX also has over 6,000 instructors on the platform with a presence of 196 countries represented world wide.

You can take discrete courses – I took one from a Harvard Law School professor to refresh my knowledge on Contract Law – and bundled course sets that, once completed, award professional certificates. Although many of the courses have a free option, you must pay to take the quizzes and tests required to obtain your certificates of completion. But, for less money than I spent to take one class at graduate school, I was able to take three classes from Columbia Business School, four from Microsoft, and three from the University of California, all taught by the same professors that teach those subjects at those institutions. My next course will be on new developments in FinTech offered by the University of Hong Kong (but only after I have read Don Quixote for pleasure, so it may be a few months).

edX was convenient for me, and it has MIT and Harvard standing behind it. Still, hundreds (thousands?) of options are available to people who want to receive college and graduate-level instruction at very reasonable rates. I liked interfacing with people from all around the world and seeing the varying perspectives people from different cultures had on issues like business ethics, the intrusiveness of Artificial Intelligence, or the importance of having fun at work. To me, this is one of the best features of MOOCs.

What's In It for You?

As an executive, I have often asked people to do things I know are possible but don’t know how to do myself. I chuckle now to reflect that I once had two secretaries, one to handle all my dictation and word-processing needs and the other to handle scheduling, travel, administration, and the like. Today, most of us handle virtually all of this ourselves. As one example of how we have so incorporated technology that we scarcely remember how things used to be done, it was faster and easier for me to type this article than to dictate it into a miniature tape recorder, give the tape to a secretary for her to transcribe, edit her work product with a red pen on a hard copy printout, then repeat the cycle until it was “publication ready.”

Perhaps data analytics might be a 2020s analogy to the 1990s example of the secretary. I am never going to be a data wonk. Still, I took Microsoft’s “Data Science Fundamentals” series to learn how to use Power BI, get a hands-on introduction to Azure machine learning, and wrestle with the legal and ethical issues likely to occur as the use of these powerful tools continues to evolve (Seattle University law professors led that course). I might still need to enlist a Gen Z expert to help me figure out complex and hidden data co-dependencies, but armed now with what I learned using Power BI myself, I can analyze large data sets (Big Data) hands-on without needing to get an application developer involved or being at the mercy of someone else’s time constraints and schedule. Having invested some time and critical thinking in the area, I am also better able to assess the validity of other people’s data illustrations and to distinguish errors analysts make between correlation and causation.

Are you a lifelong learner? Are there areas of the universe and everything within it that you would like to know more about? Do you have 2-4 hours a week that you can dedicate to pursuing your interests and making yourself more valuable to your family, your friends, and your firm? If so, and you have not yet done so, I encourage you to look at the MOOCs that are now available online and at the extensive training offered for free at the websites of most software companies and for free or nominal costs at educational platforms. To help get you started, here is one useful URL: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/money/25-killer-sites-for-free-online-education.html.

If you liked this article, you might also like these other articles written by Marcus...

• Leading an Accounting System Implementation
• How Seminary Made Me a Better Financial Executive
• The Paradox of Evil: Is God Really All-Loving?

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Marcus Jonesi is a Financial, Operations, and MIS Executive and Consultant with 20+ years of successful, broad-based leadership experience. He is a Texas-licensed CPA, a PMI-certified Project Management Professional ("PMP"), and a graduate from Fuller Theological Seminary with a Master's Degree in Theology. Mr. Jonesi is dedicated to functioning from moral principles, values, and ethics to make powerful, positive differences in the environments in which he works.