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Intentional Learning

13 August 2024

Janie completed Heather Severino’s LinkedIn Learning course, Cert Prep: PowerPoint Associate, and was excited to develop her skills in a new area.

Tags: communication, janie read, learning, skills, time management, virtual learning

As someone who hasn’t spent much time with PowerPoint, I’ve never done much to learn about its capabilities. I’ve recently been working to develop my PowerPoint skills so I can better support my Allison Partners teammates and client projects. I spent some time experimenting with settings and formatting on my own before deciding I would benefit from some formal training to help me take my skills to the next level. After some research and discussion with Rachel, I selected Heather Severino’s LinkedIn Learning course, Cert Prep: PowerPoint Associate – Microsoft Office Specialist for Microsoft 365 Apps. I’m not planning to take the exam to be a certified PowerPoint Associate, but this course seemed right because it was clearly structured and I could add it into my schedule right away. I’ve taken classes at PVCC and through Coursera in the past, but this time, I wanted to be in charge of when I started and when I finished. 

I know that I learn some things well from books, but other things require more structure and practice for me and this course was exactly what I was looking for. I really wanted a deep dive to help me build my technical skills quickly. It was also important to me to find something that would make me do hands-on practice, so I could test my learning and play with the settings and capabilities a bit as I learned new things. When I’m trying to figure something out, my tendency is to click on lots of different things to try to get the formatting or settings I want. Sometimes, this works, and I adjust things the way I wanted to, but what often happens next is that I’m not certain how I did it and can’t retrace my steps to do the same thing again later. At the end of each module of this course, there is a challenge to complete based on the content that was just delivered. Severino encourages you to complete these challenges in ten minutes. Once you finish, she has a video that walks you through all the solutions. She also makes a point to demonstrate more than one way to accomplish the different tasks, so you can choose the one that is easiest for you to remember. I thought this was the most beneficial part of the course. 

In addition to completing all the challenge exercises, I did a few other things to try to set myself up for success. One thing I know about myself is that I can be easily distracted. I wanted to make sure I was able to focus on the skills and techniques I was trying to learn, so my investment of time wasn’t wasted. For me, the most important thing was to plan when I would fit the next bit of training into my week. Some weeks, I did a full hour at a time, other weeks, I only did 20 or 30 minutes. The amount of time I spent in one sitting was far less important than making a concerted effort to minimize disruptions. When I planned my learning time for windows in the day when I was reasonably confident that I wouldn’t be interrupted, it went much better. The times when I didn’t intentionally plan my learning time like this and tried to fit it in randomly, I found myself having a much harder time focusing and I had to go back and repeat certain parts of the lessons because I missed things. 

With my busy schedule, the flexibility to watch videos, complete exercises, and revisit sections when I needed to was really helpful. I learned a lot and now that I feel more confident in my technical skills, my next step is to take another course that’s more focused on designing slides that tell the story I want to tell. I’m looking forward to continuing to build my skills and am finding LinkedIn Learning to be a great format for me. 

How do you build new skills? I’d be thrilled to hear from anyone else who might also be trying to build new skills or capabilities. What do you find works well to best support your learning?

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