Let us learn some technique I’ve been using for many many years. It helps you find out how to do stuff really quickly and saves you time. As a leader, you should really employ just in time learning, to skill up yourself and your team.
I’d like to share with you the lessons I’ve learnt over the years to help you rapidly grow your bootstrapped business and reduce your risk of failure.
So, what is just in time learning and how can I help you in your business? Well, let’s start with what it is.
It’s simple. It’s learning skills. Just before you need them, just in time learning. It’s exactly what it says on the tin. So, using a fictional scenario.
You decide you want to start a podcast and help raise awareness for your business. Three problems with that.
One, you don’t have the first idea of what equipment, software or services you need. Two, you don’t know what content you want to put out. And three, you don’t know how to promote your podcast. so really you know nothing about it. Your options are one, outsource the whole thing. That may work for some things and it may work for others. But you may need your direct input on this one. Also, you’ll find that outsourcing something like this could be expensive and if you’re bootstrapping a business and the last thing you want is to be incurring a lot of external expense.
Two, well you could sign up for an all-encompassing 12-week program. It’s overkill, probably, you’re not going to need to go into that much depth to get up and running on something like this. So, let’s rule that one out.
Three, you could do the research yourself but weeks and weeks on the internet. Searching for microphones and marketing and content production. That’s just gonna take way too much time.
Four, yeah, you could buy books on the subject, to go to the library. Yeah, that might be a little bit quicker than the internet, but unlikely. This is gonna take a ton of time 
too.
You know, you’ve got to research which books and get them and then read them, and then start the project. Or what I’m talking about today.
Number 5. Employ just in time learning. This really is the way to go you do a bit of online research find someone who’s produced a range of online courses on the subject. With at least a basic starter course, an intermediate course, and then an advanced course. And, that shows you that they really know what they’re talking about.
One thing you’ll often find is that the basic starter courses are either free or very low-cost. It’s in the course producers interest to create an effective Course that’s going to get you going. So in many cases it’s that’s all you’ll ever need. Giving you the concise and actionable content you need to move forwards.
When you log into the course of the first time you’ll find that it covers a lot of areas. Some you won’t need, so don’t even look at them just skip over those. That would be a complete waste of your time and a distraction.
Make a note of the key areas that you need and work your way through those. At each step, do what the course developer requires you to do. And apply it to your live project. Not only will it reinforce what you’ve learnt it will also move your project forwards.
The biggest cause of failure for a course is not taking affirmative action immediately, so you’ve already defeated that one. So that’s it really, simple.
See you all on my next article.