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I'm 11 years into my planning career now. I work with a lot of folks who are relatively recent grads (3-5 years or less) and am finding it tough to keep up with the skills and practices that kids are getting straight out of school these days. There was a point a few years ago where I had been keeping up pretty well: I learned AutoCAD during a stint at a consulting firm and am still pretty OK with ArcGIS. However, there are other software packages like Rhino, Illustrator, etc that I have no familiarity with, and as a busy new dad, I no longer have the free time to learn on my own. There was a time when I'd stay up late with Lynda and some training books and put the time in to learn. Now, getting pants on in the morning and out the door on time feels like victory.
Maybe there is a bigger question that I am asking here. How does one avoid the sort of mid-career stagnation that can creep in when your planning gig becomes mostly of a means to an end to provide for one's family? How do you keep learning new things when you're on the far side of 35 and your free time is extremely limited? I'm not management currently, so I don't have any direct reports - I'm more of an experienced, generalist senior planner at my current gig with a large development review workload, so training during working hours isn't really a possibility. I want to stay sharp, and current, and state of the art, and don't want to coast on my experience. And yes, I am AICP - but I frankly, I haven't found most CM offerings to be all that useful in terms of providing the necessary skillsets.
Thoughts?
Maybe there is a bigger question that I am asking here. How does one avoid the sort of mid-career stagnation that can creep in when your planning gig becomes mostly of a means to an end to provide for one's family? How do you keep learning new things when you're on the far side of 35 and your free time is extremely limited? I'm not management currently, so I don't have any direct reports - I'm more of an experienced, generalist senior planner at my current gig with a large development review workload, so training during working hours isn't really a possibility. I want to stay sharp, and current, and state of the art, and don't want to coast on my experience. And yes, I am AICP - but I frankly, I haven't found most CM offerings to be all that useful in terms of providing the necessary skillsets.
Thoughts?