How Do YOU Learn?

SEAN BRYANT: OK, let's get going. So that's me. I'm Sean Bryant, director of CADFM Consultants in the UK. That's my Twitter and Instagram handle there at the bottom, notjustcad. So if you do feel that you want to tag me in anything that reminds you of this class later on, please do.

That's me looking a little bit wistful in Leadenhall Market in London. I do dabble in a little bit of music. Got a few albums out that are on iTunes and things.

I've been the owner and lead consultant of CADFM Consultants now for 18 years, and I don't think I'd ever turn back and work for somebody else now. I work for myself, and I've thoroughly enjoyed the freedom it's given me to investigate different things that I want to teach people how to do. Owner of the blog Not Just Cad, as I mentioned.

And I write for AUGI World, Catalyst, Redshift, various other publications as well. In fact, one of my training articles based on this class is in the AUGI World Magazine that they're giving out at the AUGI booth over in the expo at the moment. I'm a content author for LinkedIn Learning.

If you do any AutoCAD courses on LinkedIn Learning, you might just recognize my voice. I've done quite a few AutoCAD courses over the last three years while I've been working with them. Been using AutoCAD and Revit now for, well, AutoCAD, a very long time 30 years-- sort of boy to man type territory that one, rites of passage-- and nine years of Revit experience as well. And there's a little bit of bucket list thing.

In 2012, I released my first album, which was good fun. Basically, it cost me a lot more money than I ever made from it, just so you know. The second album is hopefully going to be released next year. I'm working with my producer in London on that at the moment.

And the last one is a little bit of a throw away that I kind of put in. I didn't have a clue what the Geico gecko . Was I got some feedback on one of my LinkedIn Learning classes, and it was like, this guy sounds remarkably like the Geico gecko.

And I'm going what? OK, so I jumped on YouTube, Geico gecko. And I realize he's this little guy about so big. It's green. And I realized, I should have been suing Geico many, many years ago for royalties because I do sound like him. So that now tends to be a little bit of a icebreaker on a lot of presentations as you can see.

OK, now the key word for this particular class is interface. You are the interface of all of your learning. You'll understand that graphic there a little bit more in a minute. But basically, when you're learning, you are the interface.

When you drive a computer, you use a mouse, right? The mouse is the interface to make the computer work. You are the interface to make your learning work. That's the whole idea.

So the keyword is interface. I always put a keyword in every class I do or key words even sometimes. So our objectives are to consider a learning path and how to manage it. How are you going to follow a learning path? How are you going to manage it? what are you going to do with it?

Objective two is how to record that learning. How many of you still write in a notebook? It's good to see we're all still going down those traditional routes of recording things.

That's exactly what I mean. You're recording stuff. You're curating stuff for later use.

Then what we're going to look at as a little bit of how to apply that learned knowledge in the workplace. Now it doesn't matter which Autodesk products you're using. It really doesn't.

You're applying that knowledge that you've learned. You're putting it into the workplace to make you a more rounded individual, obviously. But more importantly, as you progress, you should hopefully move up the pay scale because you're gaining more knowledge, gaining more experience as you go.

Then we're going to have a little look just touching on it a little bit. How many of you have got certified while you've been here? Was it successful?

That's the good thing. It was successful, right? But the idea being that's a really good benchmark especially for you as an individual because it lets you know that you're at a certain standard of knowledge. And that's why Autodesk brought out certification-- to benchmark so that everybody's at that same level playing field.

So how do you learn? So the whole idea of this class is not product specific. It's basically how you're going to learn how to use that particular product.

And we all learn differently. We all use books, videos, YouTube, Vimeo. There's so many different ways, means, and techniques of learning now. And one of the things that we've discovered, especially at LinkedIn Learning, where I do a lot of my obviously videos and everything else-- I don't just sit there and record videos, though.

We talk about how to structure those videos. We talk about how to make those videos easier to digest so that everybody can learn. But you've got good old pen and paper, which it was lovely to see many of you still use.

And there's lots of other different ways as well, which I'm hopefully going to give you some ideas during this class. And you can walk away and think, that's a really good idea. I'm going to try that and see that it works for me because I've used many different ways of curating my learning. I still write things down.

I find that when I write things down, I remember them. But that's been drilled into me since I was yay high at sort of small school. So I'm going to introduce you to what they call the interface of learning.

Now do you actually know what an interface is? Now you don't have to read all of that, OK? It's in the PowerPoint. It's in the handout, all right? But I just jumped on Wikipedia.

And I thought, what's an interface? And the one that stood out mostly for me was that one-- a shared boundary. Now what's a boundary?

It's a fence, isn't it? IF you imagine you've got a fence between two properties, you need to jump over that fence to get to the next property. Or for example, if you're a gamer and you're on XBox, you've got to jump over that fence to get to the next level.

And that's what really stuck out for me. The other user interface, the UI-- I'm sure you've heard that description quite a lot while you've been at AU. The UI is the ribbon in AutoCAD, for example. That's a UI.

You're using an interface to drive a product. You can even get UIs that come up on the windscreens in cars nowadays, that kind of thing. So that's just really some reference information.

But the idea being is an interface is always something that allows you to share something else. So when you move your mouse, you're sharing that movement to drive the computer. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm just going to get a mouth of water because my voice is-- well, my throat hates Vegas, basically.

And this is my fourth class as well. So my throat is letting know that I've been doing lots of teaching this week. So here's the kicker, then. If you are the interface, what does that mean?

I'm just going to throw that out there. What does that mean. What does that mean to you as an individual?

And I'm expecting answers, by the way. You're not allowed to slip off the party. So anybody want to start? What does that interface mean to you? How does that interface make you feel about how you're going to learn something?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

SEAN BRYANT: Absolutely. You have to start. You've got it. You've nailed it. So for that, you get a gift.

AUDIENCE: Oh wow.

SEAN BRYANT: Have a little LinkedIn notebook Here you go. So exactly, you are the interface.

So you've got to initiate that movement, that jumping over that boundary, that shared boundary, that fence. So consider a learning path and how to manage it. Now there's a slightly more erratic method of learning, Yeah? You all know who he is, right? Wasn't it weird when you first heard him speak in real life, though?

Because he's kind of posh English, right? So yeah, that's good old Mr. Bean driving around. That's actually the Mall in London, goes down to Buckingham Palace.

It's one of the Christmas episodes, I believe. But more importantly, here's another learning path, a slightly darker one, because if you remember in "The Lion King," Simba, bless him, sees Mufasa.

But he then realizes that he has to step into Mufasa's shoes to continue that thing called the circle of life, right? So he has to learn. He has to take the initiative.

And that's what you've got to do. You've got to consider that path and how you're going to follow it and how you're going to jump over that boundary and also, more importantly, learn how to manage that path. That's the important bit.

So there's that funny little graphic that we saw earlier. Now you've got to find your path. Now there are so many different methods of learning out there now.

We have such a crazy array of information being thrown at us all the time. So we've got real world information. We've got people.

We've got written information. We've got virtual information. And it's all bouncing around, especially it's something like AU. AU is a prime example of where this little diamond here is just getting bombarded left, right, and center.

These arrows, you know, they're bouncing here and here. And you get in all this different information getting thrown at you. So I'm just going to go through these a little bit, OK? So real world-- how many of you have been classes at AU?

I'm hoping all of you. That's kind of the idea, right? So first thing you're doing is enjoying instructor-led training in the classroom like this.

Another real world one is books. I bet you all of you have got CAD books somewhere, either in the office, at home. It's all right. You can sort of say that it's not a bad thing having a book anyway nowadays. It's OK.

Peer to peer-- we all learn from each other. I can remember many, many years ago. I think I was about 18 at the time. So that's a long time ago now.

And that was when I was working on the drawing board. And I had a guy called Eric [INAUDIBLE] who used to work next to me on the next drawing board. And he was a bit of a strange guy to look at because he had this big hunched shoulder because he was the southern regional squash champion. So heh ad this massively developed right shoulder.

But I always remember one of the things he taught me about drawing on the board, actually drawing on paper and linen and acetate and everything else-- he said, it doesn't have to be the Mona Lisa. As long as it's neat, tidy, and readable, you can get it out of the door. And that stood me in really good stead when I moved and obviously moved to a CAD manager role because I realized that I had people sitting there, you know, really messing around, tidying things up.

Actually, one guy took an entire day just to move dimensions so they looked pretty. And it's like, you don't need to do that. They can still read the dimension. It's there.

But that sort of thing is peer to peer learning. And you always learn on the job with people that have more experience than you. You might be imparting knowledge to others that are younger, less experienced than you as well. Surprise, surprise, we learn from conferences. Of course we do. It's why we go there.

The other way that you can learn this from user groups. How many of you are AUGI members? That's good to see. Because AUGI has the AUGI World magazine.

It has the forums. They have webinars that you can attend as well, all about learning as well. And that's just the real world stuff.

That's just what I call the normal human interactiony kind of stuff. If we start looking at people, when you go to work, you learn from your colleagues. You go into boardrooms.

You write things on white boards. You sit around a screen sometimes when you're looking at a particular project. Might hook up a projector like we've got here and do a presentation to your peers at work about a project you're working on. And we still do written stuff. We still write things down.

Virtual-- this is where things are going. These two here are where things are beginning to go. I mean, I've got a son who's studying musical theater right now. And he has to do a journal every day of what he does at college.

He doesn't write it. It's all in Word documents. And for me, as a bit of a traditionalist, I miss that. I love to write stuff.

But then again, I've got reasonably neat handwriting. I've worked with people where I just have to give them a bit of paper and go, can you tell me what that has? Been there and done it, and it's one of those things.

But virtual is happening. It's not going to change. It's just going to get bigger, better, quicker. And I'm sure we all saw at keynote automation is becoming that really big thing.

Don't be scared of it. Don't be scared of automating your learning. It's a really good way to do it because it regulates it.

It standardizes it, and you can set it all up at work in a way that people can gain access to it. So simple things are online learning. Now, of course I'm going to put LinkedIn Learning in there because I work for LinkedIn Learning, right?

But virtual classroom-- anybody use go-to training? Anybody use that within their organization? How many of you have got remote sites within your organization.

So you've got your big old headquarters office. You've got project sites. You've got other offices all around the world, right? Go-to training, you can set up a virtual classroom.

And they just dial in via the internet. And you can present a class that way. There's a number of people that I've met, especially at AU. And they run their authorized training centers that way.

And they bring people in from all over the world. And what we're finding is a lot of this go-to training stuff, now that a lot of the developing countries are beginning to get internet, that that's how they're learning. They're using things like go-to training.

And they've got a classroom to go to. And it's just on a big screen like this in their classroom at school. It's amazing stuff.

And if you haven't considered go-to training, please do. It's a really clever way of learning. Obviously, other virtual ways-- a screen, a projector, even written. And you think, how can you virtually write things? You'll se in a minute, don't worry.

Internet-- well, it's there. It's not going to go away, is it? So we've got our browser, our tablets, our smartphones, audio. How many of you listen to something like an audio book when you're going to work and things like that?

I've got loads of people that listen to them in cars and, you know, the technology's there. And if you want to watch something visual-- I mean, I've only listed two there. There are others. But you got Vimeo, YouTube, and so on. So there's a lot of methods to go down a path. And sometimes, that can be really, really, really confusing, especially to people that have just kind of come into a job, and they've got all this information to learn.

They've got to get better. They've got to improve. And it can be quite daunting. So the whole idea of this class is just to give you some ideas on how you can learn and how you can develop that learning path and make it work for you.

So let's go a little bit down the real world. You will never, ever stop learning from people. That's why the classroom still exists. That's why AU is so successful because you will always want people to learn from people.

It is how we learn. Think about it. We learn from our mom and dad when we're small not to do things, to do things, to do things right, to learn how to walk, talk.

I mean one of the things that I taught my children not to do when they were small was put jam on toast in the VCR. Trust me, it happened-- . Insurance claim territory, unfortunately. But yeah, my little son, oh, there's a slot.

Let's put it in there. He soon learned not to do it again, which was good. He's 17 now, so he didn't do that kind of thing anymore-- just demands new iPhones most of the time. So books, hard copy, e-books-- like I mentioned earlier, hard copy books are still extremely useful. Can anybody tell me why?

AUDIENCE: Just [INAUDIBLE] references.

SEAN BRYANT: Nailed it. All my books have got little penciled notes in the margins. So you get a gift now as well.

This is not good. It's loaded. Here all the front row are getting the gift. You need to put your hands up, guys. So yeah, hard copy books-- I've got-- do you guys have Billy bookcases in IKEA in this country, the big sort of just standard rectangular ones?

I've got two of those in my office at home, and they're full of hard copy books going all the way back to, like, AutoCAD 2000, I think, possibly. Peer to peer I mentioned-- learning from others. How many of you have learned something at AU from somebody else that you've bumped into a social event, in a class?

It happens. And again, that's another really big thing about AU. That's what Autodesk love.

They love you to talk to each other. So they force you into places where you've all got to eat and drink together. That's how it works. Conference-- you think?

Right, I'm not going to go into that one. And obviously the user groups like I mentioned AUGI as well. Now there's the AUGI website there. It's dead easy to get to-- www.augi.com.

I hold them in very high affection because I was on their board of directors for five years. And I looked after all the local user groups while I was there. But we had a massive push to educate because we never used to educate. We were just a user group. And we decided to start doing webinars and improve the forums and put them on a better platform so that people could then rate the answers that you got on the forums-- very much like the Autodesk ones as well.

Now when we're talking about people, how many of you have sat or been told-- more importantly, you've sat at that interview and you've been told, oh, you'll get on the job training? What did that on the job training consist of? Was it just sitting next to somebody to learn and to learn from them?

Or was it a structured mentoring type environment? How many of you have been mentored before in an organization? That's really good to see because that's the way it should be done.

You should be mentored. And especially when it comes to things like QA and ISO 9000, it should be recorded because that is one of the most important parts of your working life is your on the job training because you're in a classroom.

You do your three day AutoCAD essentials course. That's when you've got your little stabilizing wheels on. You've got an instructor who you can ask all the questions.

Soon as you go into the real world, those stabilizing wheels are off. And you're kind of like this, weaving around, learning how to cycle around, and so on. So it's really, really important that you get what I call proper on the job training.

If you're not getting it, ask for it. Come up with a plan. Go to the powers that be and say, I'd like some proper on the job training-- you know, maybe night school, anything like that.

There's so many different ways that you can learn. I learned how to be a civil and structural engineer many years ago by doing a thing called day release. So I did my ordinary national certificate and my higher national certificate. One day a week, the company paid for me to go to college. And there was some evening classes in there as well. I'm actually degree educated, but I don't have a degree because I decided after the two certificates that I wanted to go into work and start studying for my professional qualifications.

But the whole idea is you need that on the job training. It's important, really important. Now whiteboards-- there should be one of these in every office around the world-- not just in the boardrooms, not just in the director's office, but in the CAD office as well.

When I was a CAD manager, I had a whiteboard in the corner loaded with different colored pens. And I just said to all my guys and girls, please, any ideas you have, any thoughts you have about what we're doing, the workflow, the process, write it down. And we used to have a great big list by Friday.

There were some slightly untoward silly ones in there as well because, come on, we all have a bit of banter at work, yeah? But the thing was I then took those on a Friday afternoon, put them into a Word document. And I brought them all up at the Monday morning meeting the following Monday.

And that whiteboard brought out so many different ideas, and we learned from them. And we made our processes better. The other one there sitting around the screen? We've all done it.

We'll all sort of like, oh, how are you doing this? You'll bring your chair around to somebody's desk. Absolutely-- that's a fantastic way to learn. You're learning from each other.

And the whole idea of a projector is you're projecting ideas from there to there-- brainstorming, learning. If you feel that you need to project your ideas, organize a meeting room. Organize a projector. Do it in a more formal way.

Don't just write an email. Emails get lost. Project your ideas.

Get everybody in the room. Book that time because then, they'll realize that that time is valuable. If you send a-- how many times has somebody sent you an email? It's at the top of your list here.

You haven't read it yet. And you go, I'll get back to that in 10 minutes. And then about another 55 emails come in, and it's disappeared off the bottom of the screen.

I'm guilty of it constantly. And what I do now is every time I open up my Outlook, if there's any emails in there that I just don't need. I delete them. You all get the, you know, oh, please buy new Nike trainers kind of stuff coming through.

But that all just gets thrown away. I know I signed up to the Nike website, and maybe I shouldn't have because they bombarded me with emails. But I just delete it.

And if you get a lot of that kind of trashy email coming through, unsubscribe from it. it's that simple. Then it kind of refines what's going through your mind at that particular point in time. My personal favorite, though, is writing things down.

Now as I mentioned, I'm a musician. I've got five six-string guitars at home-- three acoustic, two electric. And the only way that you learn how to play them is with this-- muscle memory.

How many of you drive to work every day? How many of you actually think about it? You don't, do you?

You get in the car, start the car up, and off you go. And then you get to work, get out of the car. I bet you a lot of the time when you're in that car, you're thinking about totally different things. Shopping lists-- have the kids got to school OK?

Muscle memory is really important, because it allows you to do things naturally. You don't have to think about it. And that's one of the things that I love about writing.

It forces me to do something which, in turn, is forcing the gray matter in here to think about it. And you retain it, you know? You put a guitar in front of me and say, play an E chord, I'll be able to because my fingers remember why they should be on the fretboard.

OK, virtual-- I've touched on this already. I just wanted to give you kind of an idea more graphically now. There's the LinkedIn Learning page there. And that's my 2019 essentials training course there. So when you've got a LinkedIn Learning account, that's what you see.

And I just wanted to show you this bit here. You've got an overview of the course. You've got the contents, which is all the exercises, videos, et cetera.

You can download the exercise files there. But you've got transcripts. So somebody has written down what I'm saying electronically. And it just pops up there like a teleprompter. So you can actually have that running while you're watching the videos.

Go to training. I couldn't find any really good screenshots of this, unfortunately. This is actually off the go-to training website. But basically what you've got there is, here you go, tablet.

I'm sitting there learning. There's a PowerPoint there. These are all the people in the classroom. And the lovely thing about go to training, having been a learner on it, is you can ask questions.

You can highlight areas to go back to. And you can have like almost a management tool where everybody signs in. And you can set it up that when the course is done, everybody automatically gets a certificate, a PDF certificate, things like that. It's a really, really clever piece of software.

Now something that I do in London-- I'm working for one of the ACCs in London at the moment. And they've got internet, obviously. But they've got webcams in every classroom and a dedicated instructor terminal that runs with that webcam.

And the system they use-- it's their own system, they developed it themselves-- is called Attend From Anywhere. So I'll be in there teaching 10 people in the classroom how to use AutoCAD. There'll be another 10 people watching me on the webcam learning remotely.

Now how many of you run training within your organizations or organize training? A system like that could, if you think about it, reduce the number of training days you need to have for a group of people. It allows people remotely to dial in, reducing their traveling costs.

It also, more importantly, allows them to learn at the same time as everybody else, keeping the learning block the same size. So you don't have to worry about them having to learn it another time. Now I know that's a long shot, and obviously, it's going to involve finance and hardware and everything else. But that's a great system to have for any organization.

And I'm not just talking training organization. You can have a dedicated room in your office somewhere that could be set up purely for remote learning for people that aren't in the office. If you think about it, Autodesk, most of their staff work from home. I work from home.

I'd say 90% of my work is at home apart from when I come to AU when it's my most manic week ever, which it is. But it's a good manic week. I like AU.

It's fun. I get to see lots of people I don't see regularly, and I get to meet lots of new friends. So it's good.

So this virtual one, I'm now going to start showing you some cool stuff that you may or may not have heard of. So I was talking about written but virtual written. This is where we start looking at different apps and different tools that allow you to curate what you do.

Anybody used Evernote? There's a few. Evernote is amazing, and as soon as I saw it, I signed up for a professional version because Evernote is the one at the back.

And you can literally create a new note at any time. But the benefit of Evernote is once you've got an account with them, you can run it on your PC. You can run it on your tablet. You can run on your phone.

And it synchronizes every time you jump onto any of the apps. And it's just great. You can actually monitor all of your training in the one place.

Now something that I do do still is write in notebooks as well-- physical, ring-bound notebooks. But we'll cover that later. There's some other amazing tools that Evernote provide.

How many of you have now got a bulging wallet or purse full of receipts to take back to work, to charge back to work? Hands up.

We've all collected the bits of paper, right? That one there is called Scannable.

And I'm doing this purely because it's a learning thing for you. It doesn't just scan receipts, though. If you've got a little bit of paper that's got something written down that's really important and you don't want it to disappear to the bottom of your laptop bag, use Scannable. It then drops it into your Evernote.

Now that one there looks like an exercise book. It's not. It's another Evernote app called Penultimate, runs on tablets.

And it allows you to treat your tablet as a notebook with a stylus. It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing.

And if you've got something like an iPad, obviously all the iPads now are Apple Pencil-compatible. Or there's another really cool company called Adonit. And I've actually got a Penultimate Adonit stylus. When Penultimate came out, they brought out a special stylus for it.

But that's the sort of quality that you can get. And the lovely thing about things like Penultimate, Scannable, and Evernote is you can drag graphics in. You can drag URLs in from web pages. You can drag-- you actually drag a web page straight into Evernote if you want to.

There's actually an Evernote-- I think it's Evernote Clipper, they call it. And it's actually-- it sits in your browser at the top, and you just drag a graphic in And all of these tools here are virtual because it's all going up into the cloud.

But you're still writing things down. You're still doing that interface thing that you were taught to do from kindergarten upwards. So it allows you to have an electronic version and, more importantly, a virtual version because all of your information is in the cloud. You're curating it. You're storing it in a safe place.

So I'm not going to bore you too much with the internet, but basically, these are the sort of mediums that we're looking at. So when you think about things like Evernote, we're talking smartphones, tablets. You can even do it on a browser. Audio, listening, video, viewing-- so just to review what we've just been through.

So here's the next step-- syntax. How do we record our learning effectively for later use? Again, I thought, oh, syntax, Wikipedia.

It's a set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in each language usually including word order. How many of you use AutoCAD? How many of you have AutoCAD standards set up that you must follow?

About the same-- good. Because you all should have standards in AutoCAD. It's kind of important.

But when I use AutoCAD and I use a textile, there's my syntax. So it's the name of the textile, which space you're using it in-- modal space or layout space- and the height. So a very common one you'll find all my drawings in the UK because we use proper measuring-- not feet and inches, by the way-- is notes, layout, 3.5.

So basically that is the textile that I use for my notes in the layout tabs, and it's got a preset height of 3.5 millimeters. So you'll find if you go into one of my drawings, I've got all those different textiles set up using a specific syntax. So how do we apply that to learning?

Well there's a note to self. Hopefully, you can all read that one. I made it nice and big for you. Use syntax for recording or your knowledge.

Now the reason you're going to use syntax is because you can then file things in a logical order. We've all done it. We've all written stuff down and then forgotten where it is and we don't know where it is, or we've saved a Word document somewhere with something really important on it, and it's like, oh, where did I save that?

I'm really bad because I save stuff to my desktop and I shouldn't because then when it comes to Friday, I've got icons everywhere. But what I do every Friday afternoon is if that is the case, I go through all of them and say, that needs to go into that folder. That needs to go into that folder. And I try and structure things using syntax, using a naming philosophy.

So date and time-- now you're thinking, what has the array command got to do with date and time? Everybody's going, huh? What does that mean? You'll understand why in a minute.

But what you do is you record when you learn something and, more importantly, what you learned. Now when AutoCAD 2012 came out, you will hopefully remember that the array command started doing that. Anything before that, 2011 backwards, that was what the array command looked like.

Now back then, I was doing a bit a contract CAD drafting through an agency. And the guy sort of said to me, oh, can you start Monday? And I thought, yeah.

Didn't even think about asking what version of AutoCAD they were using. And of course, I had to use that version because they were on an older version of AutoCAD. Now that's fine with me because I've been using AutoCAD 30 years. I know where they are.

But when 2012 came out, the array command, when you type it, is that. And that's what you've got. And a lot of people were like, oh, don't like that.

Funny enough, the 0.1 update for AutoCAD 2012, you ended up with this command. This suddenly came back, Array Classic. And that's that one.

And so when you think about it, it's a date and a time thing. If you think about, that you're saying, hang on. I learned the array command back then when it was like that. And now it's that. So you might have two different points of your learning path where the command and the interface changes.

And that's really important, and that's the sort of thing that I teach when we do things like AutoCAD courses with LinkedIn Learning. We look at the new features. But more importantly, we look at the existing features to see if there are changes.

Have you all seen how the drawing compare command has changed in AutoCAD over the last year or so? It's changed quite dramatically. It used to just be two drawings superimposed on top of each other.

There is now this amazing dropdown dialog box where you can change things, change layers, and so on. And it's evolved. But it's a different point in time. So you need to make sure that your date and your time refer to different features of the software as well.

Software versions-- there's my Monday morning experience. Can you start Monday morning? And you've got to make sure that you're aware of the changes over time in the product. To give you an example, I started on AutoCAD release 10 for DOS.

How many of you actually know what DOS means? Yep, I'm now definitely showing my age. Desk Operating System Is what it stands for, and it became MS-DOS, which was Microsoft.

And that was how Bill Gates made most of his money. He didn't make his money from Windows. He made his money from licensing MS-DOS to every single PC that was sold.

And there's actually-- just a little takeaway here, there's a fantastic book called The Outliers. And it's all about people who spend 10,000 hours becoming really good at what they do. And it mentions people like Bill Gates, the guys that created Apple, hockey players, and so on.

One another one is The Beatles, for example. Beatles played many, many tiny little nightclubs in Hamburg and all around Germany. And that was how they learned their craft.

I've got friends of mine in the music industry who saw them when they were much younger, and they said they were rubbish. It was only when they'd done their 10,000 hours that they got better. So again, it's all about that time. It's about date and time and improving.

So older newer versions of AutoCAD-- syntax, again. The trick there-- if you're writing things down in a notebook, have a different notebook for each version of AutoCAD. And have it on the front of the notebook-- AutoCAD 2014, AutoCAD 2015, and so on.

And then you'll recording what you learn by version. So you're using your syntax. If you're putting journals in Evernote, Evernote is fantastic because you have a great, big filing system down the left hand side. And you just break it down like a Windows filing system.

So you'd have each version sitting there in Evernote. And it would be all you've learned about each version of the software. Give you an example-- there's one of mine that I just dragged and dropped real quick into the PowerPoint.

These are my LinkedIn Learning ones. So these were AutoCAD tables of contents for courses that need revising. So I've got AutoCAD 2016. It was released then.

That's one of the courses that I need to change the THC on. I need to update it. And there's 2017, 2018, and so on. And it's that simple.

It's just using that syntax to file things, to organize things. It's really important. Now storage-- it's real simple. If you follow this ethic with all of your learning and your knowledge, there will never, ever be enough storage. There won't be.

If you use notebooks, you'll always run out shelf space. If you use a computer, hard drive space. If you're using a portable hard drive, I've got, I think, five portable hard drives now.

I've been using them for about six years. Every year, I pretty much fill one up, and I have to get another one. And again, you have to build redundancy into those. They're not going to last forever.

So you have to think about more storage that you might have to go to later. So give you an idea-- that isn't my office, but there's the Billy bookcases with all the books. So there's your hard copy books, your notebooks, et cetera.

I use these kind of notebooks, the ring-bound ones. And I always use the ones that have the tear-outable pages as well just because if I make a mess of a page, I can pull it out, and it makes my notebook look tidy. But that's the idea.

So that's the hard copy journals, bookshelves, you know, your AutoCAD for Dummies, all that kind of stuff. Portable hard drives-- those are the ones I've got. I've got five of those things.

I use Western Digital, those ones there. There's lots of other brands out there. And I normally get something like a one terabyte one. And I think now, scarily, you can buy ones that go up to eight terabytes. That's one hell of a lot of data.

And the other way you can store things-- in the cloud. If you're on subscription, you'll all have an Autodesk drive account. Dropbox, box.com-- there's also Google Drive. There's also Microsoft OneDrive. There's loads of storage space. So applying your learned knowledge in the workspace-- I would like you to go back now 31 years when I was a very-- I was I was a lot thinner than. I was a much thinner CAD person then.

But I've just been on my first AutoCAD essentials course. I worked in petrochemical engineering for a long time. And Peter was my head of department, guy called Peter Skidmore. And I was sitting there at my desk with my very old version of AutoCAD.

And what I was doing was I was actually converting all of our paper drawings, our standard details, to CAD. That was the first job. We wanted all of our standards on CAD, which is why I got sent on the AutoCAD course. So Peter kind of sees me come into the office on the Monday and, after about half an hour, gets his chair, drags it all the way out of his office, trundles down, puts his chair next to me, and just sits there looking over my shoulder.

And it's like, he watched me for about 15 minutes clicking away, drawing stuff. And he turned around, and he said to me, if I'd known you still had to draw things, I wouldn't have sent you on the course. I thought you just pressed Enter, and the drawing came out. Yeah?

Now that's all based on perception. He thought it was one of those things where almost like you kind of scanned the drawing. You fed it in, hit a button, and all of a sudden, they were saved in CAD. But I explained to him how it all helped things like Move, Copy, Rotate, and how those were saving me so much time. I wasn't having to do those on a drawing board.

How many of you have used a drawing board? Excellent. And you all remember doing the scratchy thing and then the talcum powder and then making sure the ink didn't run and-- yeah, exactly.

So if you had to move something or copy something, that's what you had to do. Now it's just a case of click, click and you move it. So there was that perception of what could be done.

But what I did as well was I also explained to him things like efficiency, productivity, return on investment. And one of the things I said to him was the return on investment will be long term. But once everybody's using CAD in the drawing office, you will be able to get drawings out so much quicker.

And I ended up basically training everybody else in the drawing office on how to use CAD. And over time, over the nine years I was with the company, I ended up as the CAD manager of the organization with about 25, 30 people working for me. And that's purely because I learned something and developed it over time.