Imagine that your new job required you to become fluent in a new foreign language in 6 months.
Someone might suggest: use DuoLingo.
Have you ever used DuoLingo? It’s great… for what it is.
Have you become fluent in a foreign language through DuoLingo?
Become proficient?
Conversational?
Or have you just learned a few words and perhaps enough to do the American version of learning a language – you can say “hello”, “thank you”, and “where is the restroom?” 🙂
We (my family) travel quite a bit, and I eagerly embrace the idea of using DuoLingo to learn the language of our next destination.
I love to learn. I am highly self-disciplined. But I end up being just a few steps ahead of what I described above.
We have a relationship with an English language training school in Spain. So I have had numerous discussions regarding how best to learn languages. The Europeans always laugh when I discuss apps. “So American! Fast. Fast. Fast.”
When we discuss further, they point out the obvious:
You are holding a device – whether it’s a phone, I-Pad, or computer – that is the biggest cause of your distraction. How long will you learn to conjugate verbs when you click on notifications from texts/Instagram/newsfeeds etc.?
The same is true with career apps, which “in theory” are great but rarely do much in reality.
I had a friend who created an app: “90 days to a new job”. He noted that it failed because of “compliance.”
“They just didn’t do what the app directed them to do.”
I kept quiet. But what did he expect: the app would reach out and force the person to research a new career path?
Back to the example above, if your new job was dependent on mastering a foreign language, it would be crazy to rely on your use of an app to do so. Presumably you would enroll in classes/tutoring – something with human training asap.
The same is true with any area of importance: like your career!