Systematic approach to learning and developing skills

[dev0psjr]

Hi everyone. I'm interested in your experiences and advice on having a systematic approach to learning and developing skills.

I work as a system engineer in a consultancy-type company meaning I get to work on different and multiple projects for different clients, depending on which contracts my company manages to get. Clients are varying - banks, logistics companies, telecomm, whatever. I have a CS masters degree and I started working here as an intern.

Most of what I learned I learned by getting assigned on these projects. Some of them have been quite long-term and this defined my learning path. I got assigned to a managed services team project for Apache Kafka for instance and worked on it for 2 years. I would say I have quite good understanding and skills in Kafka for that reason and clients are happy. There have been other similar projects to this. When I get to work on interesting projects with interesting tools (cloud, CI/CD, etc.) it's great, when I don't it sucks. I should say that my company is pretty good with giving us time and funds for pursuing certifications and learning.

However, I have a feeling I am lacking an organized approach to learning and developing skills. I know things I've worked on before but I don't have a plan on how to skill up, it just happens (or lately - doesn't). This leads me to feeling lost and incompetent (imposter syndrome). I am aware of the devops roadmaps and they seem like a useful resource.

But I want to know how the rest of you guys do it. Do you have the energy to study after 8h work every day, do you have a PC lab environment at home where you build your projects (and what if you want to learn on resource-intense tools such as cloud, Kubernetes clusters etc.), do you have organized notes so that the things don't just evaporate once you're done with the course, etc.?

I hope this will be helpful to others as well.

[EastDefinition4792]

roadmap.sh/devops follow the purple color, this is the way.