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In Depth: Education - An ongoing activity

For the sake of brevity, the education sections on resumes tend to be short and sweet, a "bullet list" of institutions or organizations where formal classes and recognition occurred. However, anyone who works in any field of Information Technology understands that education is a continuous process, that technology changes and grows so rapidly that if you are not always studying the latest and greatest advances, you are falling behind.

In my earlier days one way I accomplished that was trade magazines, especially those that focused on the IBM AS/400 and RPG programming. These days, with the Internet, knowledge is only a web search away. Not a day goes by that I am not presented with a new problem or that I have a new idea, and I search the web for solutions for those problems and implementation techniques for those ideas.

In my current position, we recently upgraded from Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2010. At home I subscribed to Office 365 which means I'm using the 2013 version of MS Office. If you have used these products you understand what a leap it is going from Office 2003 to 2010 or 2013. With a quick search, however, it is easy to find essays and tutorials that, for each Office product (Word, Excel, Access, etc) discuss the differences. This is a great way to move quickly past that steep learning curve and become productive quickly with the new versions.