Self education is how I would describe my way up to the ladder (both professionally as well as knowledge wise). I always believed in a notion that a person is more knowledgeable if he/she has taken formal training in his/her chosen discipline. I tried fooling myself by taking up a few courses here & there but all of them failed to give me the real world knowledge.
There are three disciplines that have been useful in my self-education: Reading, practicing, and collecting. There are many long lists of suggested reading for UI design, and there are a host of great blogs covering different aspects of designs.
I began by creating directory of bookmarks carefully categorised for easy access. Tools like delicious, Google notebook, & my own blogs became repository of all the precious links that I thought I’d require at some point of time.
But needless to say that most of the time I ended up googling rather then remembering to open my carefully stacked treasure. Although the habit of collecting never went waste as I got the opportunity to browse through them for some inspiration, whenever I got some time.
Collecting isn’t enough in itself. Paying close attention to what thinking goes into a product creation and applying those observations to my work is what makes this exercise pay off. I put this into practice with a my current job and this led me to exploring more growth oppportunities. Not limiting myself to one stream but participating in the entire cycle of product creation.
mishrelic 