Let’s look at four different levels of understanding. Whenever we take on anything new, we all experience these stages, and recognising them helps us to evaluate ourselves and our progress.
Unconscious Incompetent, Conscious Incompetent, Conscious Competent, Unconscious Competent.
Career changers often start at stage one – Unconscious Incompetent. This is when 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 lead us! Sounds pretty desperate, but the important 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.
Next comes stage two – Conscious Incompetent. We’re now probably at the start of our training course. Having been explained the different options, we’ve decided on our career path. So we now know what we have to learn – in other words we’re conscious of what we don’t know yet, or what we’re currently incompetent at.
Understanding this is important, to have the wisdom of knowing where we are. Grasping conscious incompetence means that we don’t get quite so frustrated in the early stages of our learning – it’s possible we’re not very good at it (especially if it’s been a while since we were at school…) but we know we’ll get better. Modern interactive learning accelerates this process, so we won’t be at this stage for long.
Stage three is Conscious Competent. We’re in the flow of the learning environment, and are picking things up much faster. We still have to consciously think about what we’re doing all the time, but we’re able to learn competently. We’ll probably complete our studies and successfully pass our exams whilst in this learning stage, which is likely to also extend into our working life too.
Remember when we learned to drive a car? We’d got to conscious competency by test time – good enough to pass the exam but still consciously aware of every manoeuvre. It wasn’t until we gained more experience to consolidate the knowledge that we moved into stage four.
Unconsciously Competent – In IT, we’ll probably be several years into our working experience before we reach stage four. We understand what we need to know, and no longer have to consciously think about why we do something. Although for the true professional school’s never over, (and definitely in computer-related careers the joy is there’s always more to learn) achieving these dizzy heights of understanding makes all the hard work worth it.
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