It is hectic to find time for yourself especially when you have a job that is demanding -During the 2020 pandemic, I tried to be more structured in the way I wanted to dedicate my time on training and development and I had 3 main objectives: learn new product management areas, dedicate time to attend various sessions/webinars (that I identified during the year) and maintain industry / market certifications.
I will start with the following advice – If you have the luxury (like I do at my current company) to dedicate some personal time on “training and development”, please read this: I started building my training list in june…. this list included anything I wanted to spend time on (webinars, certification maintenance, books) and was populated all year long after discussions I had with colleagues, vendors, friends… In November, I identified the week I wanted to dedicate to “learn” and started to review/clean my list and create my own daily plan…. As it was prepared since june, I just had to organize / sequence it per day… For each day, I knew what I had to work on and accomplish. If you do this preparation all year long, you will save a lot of your own time and will know exactly what you will have to work on ….
The week before my “Training week”
I started my journey by attending a workshop mid-december with ProduXlabs on Product Operations. I wanted to know more about that trendy topic and see then how I can apply principles / methodology with my team at my own job/company…
What I liked about this workshop is the great energy and collaboration with the different attendees across the globe. Denise Tilles was our instructor – she was patient and tried to address all of our questions… Some of us had already a great start of implementing Product Ops at their company and others had different levels of maturity – I will share more about Product Ops in general in a future post.
During my training week
– As I wanted to learn new things around Data Science and AI, I decided to complete the following courses from Coursera… I was able to complete both in 1 week…. Artificial Intelligence for Everyone by Andrew Ng and Crash Course in Data Science – John Hopkins University with Brian Caffo, Jeff Leek and Roger Peng. I then signed up on 4 other courses to complete the Executive Data Science Specialization – It will take 5 weeks to complete.
Related to Product Management sessions on LinkedinLearning, I do recommend those ones:
- Learning Design Thinking: Lead Change in Your Organization by Turi McKinley
- Learning Design Sprints by Emmanuel Henri
- Technology for Product Managers by Cole Mercer – This is part of a 18 hour session of “Becoming a Product Manager” – It is excellent refreshers for all product managers and leaders… In every session, I learned something… … always start your journey by assuming you do not know anything… you will see .. it is always good to have some refreshers…
I started to read the first 2 chapters of “Empowered” from Marty Cagan and Chris Jones… Lessons from Top Tech Companies and Coaching Product Teams. I loved the chapter around “The Assessment” that is describing the coaching tool for helping managers of product people via 3 domains: People, Process and Knowledge….I keep going with the reading…
For my PMP certification maintenance, I attended the following sessions from International Project Management Day 2020
- Influencing Virtual Teams: 5 Best Practices for Success by Hassan Osman
- Simple Strategies to reduce Stress by Susan Croft
- Managing successful Machine Learning Projects from Neeraj Kashyap
- AI in Project Management: Then Next Generation of Project Decision Making by Marcus Glowasz
- Our Unconscious Bias and Microaggressions by Louria Lindauer
For my Salesforce work, I attended a few sessions of the first virtual Dreamforce conference (Analytics Track) and was able to maintain my Platform App Builder certification … I finally reached the Ranger Level with more than 110 Badges in myTrailhead…. I found some tremendous content not only around salesforce but also around personal development, virtual collaboration etc…
ThinkerSquid 
Agree with you Michael! it is clear that one should never stop studying!
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Thanks Michael, what a great start! Can’t wait for the next post.
I will definetly try your recommendations to plan and organize advance my own annual training plan.
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You are very welcome Jeanne – Laure ! stay tuned :-).
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