BARRY COLLINS It’s time to learn our software lessons the easy way.
There have never been more opportunities to better ourselves – it’s time to take advantage
Journalism is a strange business. There’s no formal training worth the course fees (the NCTJ may disagree), no exam to pass to earn your “media badge”. Most people turn up on day one with the word “reporter” or “writer” somewhere in their job title and learn the job as they go along. There is no point – like there is with accountancy or law – where someone pats you on the back, hands you a certificate and declares you a fully trained “journalist”. You’re a journalist from the moment your first article appears in print or on a publisher’s website. (Your own website doesn’t count, bloggers. Sorry.)
I had a similar professional identity crisis when I relinquished the editor’s seat of PC Pro three years ago and set out to become a “photographer”. I’d done a couple of modules as part of my degree course, but didn’t have any formal photography qualifications. Over 20 years I had taught myself out of books, magazines and sheer practice how to take and edit a decent photo, but could I get away with calling myself a photographer and charge people for my work? The only way to find out was to do it, and three years later – with a small stable of repeat customers – I don’t feel a fraud describing myself as a photographer on a business card or my LinkedIn profile.
It was while writing this month’s feature about the lesser-known applications in Adobe’s Creative Cloud ( see p48) package, that I began to wonder what else I’d be able to describe myself as in years to come. The tools that teach you how to use complex software have never been better or more accessible.
Adobe itself deserves an enormous dollop of the credit for this. Go to any of the product pages for its Creative Suite apps, and you’ll find a dozen or more video tutorials walking you through how to get started with the packages. The Muse web design software, for example, includes a six-step, hour-long tutorial showing you how to do everything from creating the site template, to placing graphics, running in text, making the site responsive and embedding interactive Google Maps – and it even provides a set of dummy assets (logos, images, text) so you can follow the video guide and knock up the same website. Within an afternoon, I’d gone from never using the software to building a fully responsive portfolio-style website that was uploaded to Adobe’s test servers.
Modern hardware and connectivity makes this kind of self-learning much easier than it’s ever been before. I had the Muse software open on my 27in desktop screen and Adobe’s video running on the 14in HD screen of my laptop alongside it. As the videos are streamed in HD, it’s possible to see precisely which icon the demo leader is clicking on, making the tutorials much easier to follow than in years gone by, when they’d have to zoom in on certain parts of the screen to make the icons legible. And with the video being streamed over a near-80Mbits/sec fibre connection, I could scroll back and forth through the video, without waiting for an irritating buffer icon to stop spinning.
Adobe isn’t alone in devoting this kind of attention to helping people pick up its software, either. The Serif Affinity Photo software I reviewed in this magazine last month has dozens of online tutorials showing you how to use almost every feature in its cut-price Photoshop rival, which is as much of a godsend for customers as it is for time-pressed reviewers. And even if companies don’t devote the time to producing video tutorials of their own, you’ll normally find loads of YouTubers willing to step into the breach with video tutorials of their own. Recently, I’ve learned how to lay out a pamphlet in InDesign and process advanced payroll data in Excel using videos I’ve found on YouTube – skills that will serve my business well in the future.
My online education hasn’t stopped at software. This month I had the pleasure of interviewing Mait Müntel, the founder of language-learning app Lingvist. I won’t spoil the story ( see p22), but he devised a brilliant way to learn languages by focusing on only the 90% of words you’ll need to achieve, say, “conversational French” and then battering them into your brain in a short space of time using machine learning. Within three-anda-half hours, I’d picked up 387 words of French, enough to understand 48% of any written text, according to the software. And although it would take many more hours to get me nearer that magical 90% figure – the rate of progress isn’t linear – I definitely feel I could make it if I could find enough spare time to complete the course.
After 20 years in this business, it’s pretty rare that I’m awestruck. But the ability to fire up YouTube or an app and learn something that can boost your professional skillset is just that – awesome. I don’t know what I’ll be calling myself in 20 years’ time – journalist, photographer, designer, developer, linguist – but I genuinely feel each is a possibility.
Within an afternoon, I’d gone from never using the software to building a fully responsive portfolio-style website