Preamble
I wrote this article sometime in the past, but I never published it. Articles like this one can be perceived as self-serving, which is not my style. I knew the day would arrive when it was time to publish it. Today is that day.
Today I was listening to a new video from the Professor of Rock. He was discussing the song “Dream Weaver” by Gary Wright. In the interview, Gary mentioned that platinum records, fame, and money were “nice,” but the aspect of his career that he enjoys is when his music helps people (go to 6:30 in the video).
When he commented on helping people, I thought about this article and decided it was time to publish it. Please take the time to watch the interview to appreciate the brilliance of Gary Wright and the fantastic interviewer known as the Professor of Rock! His videos are fantastic, and you will be a fan of his YouTube channel.
Introduction
To experience career improvement, people need to strive to achieve continuous education. Continuous education can be in many forms, including taking classes, learning from project experiences and team members, learning from leaders and clients, reading books and online content, and many other activities.
Performing challenging work that extends your knowledge base and skillsets is one of the best activities because you will experience the joys of learning to do something new. You will also quickly realize the benefits that new skills can bring to you.
Like some foods are more nutritionally dense than others, this article is informationally dense. I assembled this article using thirty-five years of continuous education and consistent project execution in various disciplines. There is a lot of information packed into these paragraphs. Reading it might be a bit of a slog through the mud. I’ll try to keep it exciting and on-topic.
Background
This story begins precisely 40 years ago, as I walked down a high school hallway on graduation night. As my good friend walked next to me, he said something that startled me, and I stored his statement as a significant memory. He patted his belt area and smiled at me when he said:
“My education is over now that I have my high-school diploma under my belt”.
Nameless, June, 1981, Berwyn, IL
What occurred next could be described as a bit of a firestorm in my brain. Although I had no detailed plan on what to do with my life as I walked down that hallway, I instinctively knew that my education was not over. Little did I realize, but my education was beginning and would occur every day of my life.
Educational Methods Keep Evolving Due to Technological Change
When I began college three months later, education methods were already changing, although I didn’t understand them. My first-semester tuition charge was $525, and the textbooks were less than $100. Most students didn’t own computers. There were no laptops, no portable phones, no email, no internet, and color monitors were not yet ubiquitous.
We had school-supplied personal computers with monochrome monitors, 8088 central processing units, and if you were lucky, there was an 8087 math co-processor onboard. If we asked a modern-day student to work with this hardware level, they wouldn’t like it very much and quickly become frustrated. They would, however, enjoy the relatively inexpensive tuition and book costs!
By the time I finished my formal education seven years later, we had better hardware and software to use. Items like spreadsheets, word processors, mathematical software, compilers and linkers, and graphics programs were available.
However, most of the software tools I used to complete my Master’s degree no longer exist. They have either been replaced by better means or eliminated due to technological change. When was the last time you used Borland’s Turbo Pascal compiler or Interleaf’s brilliant typesetting program?
About that time, I remember hearing about a new programming idea called object-oriented design. I would not be employed in a technical field if I had stopped my education after seven years of college.
From that point, my career unfolded in three-decade-long sessions. I’m now working in my fourth decade. In the following sections, I outline how each of these decades transpired and why continuous education was needed for me to be successful. You can skip this section if you only want to learn how to help people in their careers.
A Summary of My Work History
I have visualized my work history, as shown below. Data dorks tend to do this type of thing.
Decade 1 – Working in the environmental field as a computational hydrogeologist, I saw the development of faster computers, larger hard drives, better monitors, printers and plotters, new computing languages, new operating systems, and the early internet. Modems, local area networks, peer-to-peer connections, and the advent of online gaming began. We received our first cell phones, with buttons that had to be pushed 1, 2, or 3 times to form a letter. One day this new technology came out called “sending a text.” I thought to myself, who would ever want to spend the time to type a message like that? Making a phone call is so much easier! Now trillions of text messages later, the education of Kenny has continued. Simple phones were transformed to flip phones which years later transformed into fruit phones like blackberries and apple phones which suddenly became smartphones because they were all undergoing continuous education and development, too!
Decade 2 – Computers grew bigger into massively parallel supercomputers during my second decade of work. I was lucky enough to use some of these because I lived down the street from them. As the computational speed race took place between the US and Japan, I watched gigaflop capable computers turn into teraflop computers, which have now evolved into a petaflops level of performance. To use these computers required that I learn the techniques of writing parallelized codes, which distributed the workload from a central CPU out to the computational worker nodes. Not only did computers get faster, everything did. Portable phones got quicker and more capable, the world-wide-web expanded dramatically, computer modems were replaced with hard-wired internet lines, and many companies started building mobile devices to make our lives easier. Every technical arena I was interested in was changing, from natural sciences to computer sciences to life sciences. I had to learn so much to keep up with the changing times. By the end of my second decade of work, artificial intelligence, stochastic methods, and other advanced modeling techniques were developed and implemented in the environmental simulation models I was building. Late in this decade was also the first time I began learning from online resources such as technical blogs. It was good that I didn’t stop my education after two decades!
Decade 3 – Jumping right into a new career called being a “process improvement consultant,” I decided to use my programming and mathematical abilities differently. I worked very hard to learn statistically-based process improvement methods. That required intensive studies of basic statistics through multi-variable design of experiment approaches. I wrote computer codes and performed experiments on industries and businesses worldwide. I was never a subject matter expert in these experiments, but I had to learn about each company operated to explain how we could help them. These years were a complete immersion in continuous education, not only of the statistical materials, but I also learned from my expert co-working mentors! During this time, I also realized that my unique method of education shifted from book learning to online learning. Search engines replaced the book content I owned because the internet delivered the latest information I needed. I recognized and began to understand the value of technical blogging and the benefits of sharing information with others. Once again, after three decades, I didn’t stop learning.
Decade 4 – Shifting into overdrive, I hit top speed by beginning to work in the automotive field. I used my diverse skill sets of computer programming, data prep and visualization, applied mathematics, mathematical modeling, and statistical improvement methods. I blended these skills to solve challenging problems. I gained experience working with diverse data sources, including Hadoop hive, Oracle, IBM DB2, Teradata, Greenplum, and AWS. Continuous education has been key to advancing my career in my fourth decade of work.
What I have learned during these 3.5 decades is that technological change is constant, and we all have to keep learning to keep up with the job demands we experience.
How to Help People Improve Their Careers
Now we have arrived at the purpose of this article. It has taken me 3.5 decades to understand what I am about to tell you. There is no way that I could have written this article without having lived through my experiences.
We are all interconnected. Whether we work for the same company or not, we have all learned from each other. My project experiences coupled with excellent software products have allowed me to build my skills. Software and programming languages such as AutoCAD, Tecplot, Dreamweaver, Adobe Products, Microsoft Products, Alteryx, Tableau, R, Python, C++, C, Fortran, Pascal, and Basic have served me well.
I have also learned to do many things based on reading and studying the work of others. Many of my marketable skills exist because of the work of others! These developers, bloggers, and innovators have helped shape me into the person I am. These people have helped improve my career. There is no denying that, and I am very grateful that these people were willing to share their insights, knowledge, and analysis methods with me.
I have been trying to help people improve their careers by authentically and honestly sharing my knowledge, work methods, and ways of thinking. I do that primarily by writing articles and openly sharing videos, but I also perform training courses. Throughout my publication history, I have intentionally kept my message pure. I have not written articles for anyone but myself. I have never charged money for the content I have developed. I have never installed advertisements in my work. I openly and honestly share my experiences and knowledge. This approach is how I hope to help people improve their careers, even if it puts me in jeopardy of losing my competitive edge.
I chose this path many years ago because I realized in decade three that I learned from people who openly shared their codes and insights. I knew that sharing knowledge could be a great thing to do. However, the concept of knowledge sharing was in opposition to the detailed work experiences I had in decades 1 through 3. During those times, innovation was to be kept secret. For example, I developed codes that displayed model results in graphical formats. I could not share those codes because they gave us “a competitive advantage.”
Everyone in business needs items that give them a competitive edge. Sports teams need the best athletes that can give them a competitive advantage. Companies that sell products need things to give them a competitive edge, like volume purchasing to offer items at lower prices. Our world is full of competition. Giving away knowledge isn’t a part of that equation.
However, I contend that this is a mistake. Let us share our ways of thinking about problem-solving and how we develop specialized techniques. Let us share the methods that we use to solve problems. We need to document detailed solutions to complex problems to help propel us forward. This need is why I share knowledge without violating any work-based rules or regulations.
When I publish a specific technique, typically, that technique is derived for another purpose. It takes me extra effort to obfuscate how or why we developed the method, but the effort is worth it. These articles help me remember what I did, and this approach allows me to share ideas with others when the time is right for them to find them. This collective sharing of information helps people advance in their careers. However, always remember to ethically work for your employer and never release any secret or confidential information.
Now It Is Up To You
Now that you know how important it is to share information to help others in their careers, you must begin practicing this craft. Here are some tips for doing so.
If you have passion for your job and you enjoy taking time to find solutions to problems you have,, recognize that those are opportunities for sharing insights. I learned that if I spent some time developing a technique in Tableau, Alteryx, Python, or R, and I couldn’t find that technique in an internet search, I wrote an article about it. If you are creative and desire to help others, start writing about a problem you solved and publish it on LinkedIn, a blog, YouTube, Medium, Quora, Reddit, or any other platform you read. The responses you get might surprise you.
By being patient with yourself, you can assemble a collection of articles that carries value into the future. You don’t have to pressure yourself into monetizing a blog or writing a certain number of articles per month. Just let the work come to you naturally and enjoy the process of sharing your knowledge. Eventually, you will develop your style for doing this work. You will also assemble a knowledge portfolio that will help you in many ways in your future. It will help you advance in your career.
Any idea can be a great idea for an article, even if you think nobody will read it. I have been surprised by writing a technique that I think is trivial, only to find out that it has a sustainable readership.
Figure 1 shows an example of an Alteryx article that I wrote nearly six years ago, on 6/24/2015 (today is 6/21/2021). In the article introduction, the second sentence says that this is a minor technical detail related to rounding currencies to the nearest dollar.
I remember thinking that it was a waste of time writing this article because nobody would ever read it. The only reason that I wrote it was to document a technique that I discovered and would probably have to use again. I have not had to use this again, but many other people have needed it, as you will soon see!
As shown in Figure 2, this insignificant article has now risen into second place on my list of most-read articles, with 13,432 views. Notice that all the top-performing articles are technique-based. Simple techniques lead to great information-sharing opportunities, and many of these have a long-term sustained readership.
I had no idea that was the case until I pulled the WordPress content management system numbers. As shown in Figure 3, over the past 365 days, this rounding article is in first place, six years after it was written! With 2,033 reads in 365 days, this article gets read 5.5 times per day. That stat blows me away.
Final Thoughts
The information and insights in this article were assembled over decades. I could not have written it when I was first starting my career. I wanted to share this information because it gives me great pleasure when someone tells me that my articles have helped them.
The next step in the “sharing of happiness” is for me to help someone else experience those same feelings. Would you please do this by writing an article and receiving feedback, as I received in Figure 4? I promise that it is worth the effort and the rewards will surprise you. Good luck, and let me know if you need any help or advice.
