The Beginning...

Welcome to my blog, The Learning Apprentice. As you no doubt have seen from the blog description, I have recently developed a keen interest in both leadership and management. This came about through various factors, which I will discuss below, but the goal with this blog is to grow and learn and at the same time, share my findings with you along the way.

On a side note, I will try to relate the topics of discussion back to an IT perspective, but these teachings could easily be applied to any discipline. In some cases, I actually found that some of these topics have affected me on a personal level and have given me a deeper understanding of people and family relationships.

The Next Manager

Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to be selected to attend a course on becoming a leader & manager and it really opened up my eyes and answered a lot of lingering questions that had been burning me up inside. I found that when developers were "thrown" into a leadership role, such as team lead, and were often ill equipped for the situation, at least from a soft skills perspective (I know I was). This was therefore one of the goals of the blog, to help people better handle those leadership situations.

Simple Programmer

Lastly, I cannot thank John Sonmez enough for his great website Simple Programmer. He really has some excellent posts and I really enjoy the softer topics that he covers. In a world we are constantly trying to keep up with the latest technology, I feel like his blog gives a breath of fresh air to the industry, especially his posts that focus on "non-technical", but equally important issues.

In addition to the treasure trove that is Johns blog. He also provides a free blogging course, which is delivered to you via email over the course of several weeks. At first I wasn't sure what to expect, but John has done a great job in separating the tasks in a clear and well defined manner. Along the way, he gives you nuggets of information on how, and what to do, in order to make your blog a success. For me, one of the biggest takeaways that I wouldn't have discovered on my own, was the need to be consistent. If you are in anyway inclined to start a blog, be sure to check it out!

That wraps it up for my first post, so lets get going and see where this journey takes us.

Until next time....keep learning!