The daily prompt asks – What’s the best online course you’ve ever taken?

To be entirely honest, it’s been years since I have done an online course. I can’t even remember a remote favorite. I know, I’m wasting all that knowledge and experience.

Not that I don’t watch YouTube videos for tips and tricks.

What I will do instead is talk about the importance of a mentor. Online courses and manuals will only take you so far. That personal experience with someone with decades of experience can be an invaluable way to learn. At least that was my personal experience.

The people being mentored know the importance of it. The people doing it understand that it’s important for the group to succeed. The mid-level managers and supervisors know it because they trained the trainers.

It was especially important throughout the whole of my 50 years in newspapers. Having worked at small, medium and large companies, it was the one thing consistent throughout. Now whether some upper management realized it was even going on or not or the importance of it is another thing.

Maybe it was just the era I came up in or the work experiences I had, but people shared knowledge. Well yeah, you always have some that try to use it as power, but a majority of people were mentors or being mentored. The amazing thing to me is that it was so informal.

When you paired the right people together the gains were immediate and significant. In the IT environments I worked in, we wore many hats. Way too many hats in most cases.

Even early on when it was with production equipment, in the engraving and press areas. There were no safety training or warnings or manuals. When people started in the pressroom, you were taught where to and where not to put your hands. What to do when you hear a bell. What path not to be in as to not to be run over by the clamp truck bringing couple ton rolls of newsprint to the press. How to climb through a running 9-unit web offset press like a jungle gym to adjust ink settings because that is how it was done on old presses.

Later, as a UNIX Admin, we had to know operating systems, network, security, storage, backup, database, applications, performance tuning, redundant disaster systems at multiple locations on platforms from every company known to man.

At each stage and many in between, I was either being taught or teaching someone.

Only towards the end of my career did I notice companies pitting employees against each other. That internal competition has its own set of problems, which they are finding out.

Sorry to ramble on so long. Online courses are cool. Mentors are a more powerful learning tool though. IMHO.