Draft a Learning Plan with AI
In this career project, learn a new skill with simple structure and AI prompts
TLDR
Since this is a long post and if you just want to get straight to the prompts, feel free to scroll down to the heading ‘AI prompts to build a learning draft’ - follow the bolded normal text headlines, use a program like ChatGPT, use the AI prompts which are in code font and in a block quote:
like this
A Paradigm Shift
Over the past year, I've been curating Career Growth Challenges, crafting intricate logs that act like quests designed to develop skills and elevate career enhancement. The foundation of these challenges has rested upon the monthly career growth log. This log acted as a checklist outlining tasks to improve on specific skills.
While the career challenge logs have proven to be an invaluable medium, a juncture has arrived. My aspiration is to create more comprehensive, meticulously researched content.
Rather than confining the newsletter to the monthly release of a singular career challenge log, I am eager to diversify the content landscape, providing subscribers with a broader spectrum of engaging projects and insightful challenges focused less on the medium and more on the outcome that will help grow your career.
I aim to provide at least one meticulously more comprehensive and crafted career challenge, that can be a log, project or simply a post every month, that encourages and supports continuous professional growth.
Using this newsletter, you can pick any challenges from any month and work through them in any period that suits you and your career goals. You can take as long as you wish to complete them.
Bonus Content
Remember you'll also be able to get the weekly Monday Motivation in your inbox and also the latest AI Career prompts (via the web weekly) as frequent posts.
Now let’s get started with this month’s project!
What is a learning plan?
A learning plan acts as a structured document outlining a strategy to help guide us through our professional development. The format of such a learning plan can vary depending on your own learning style. However, typically, it includes what you are learning, goals, resources, and an outline of what knowledge and skills you want, normally with a schedule of some kind. Learning plans can be tailored to various contexts, including academic pursuits, career development, personal enrichment, or skill enhancement.
A learning plan is a tool that empowers us to take control of our learning journey, helps us set achievable goals, and almost acts like an compass to root us in our personal and professional development. It provides a framework for intentional learning and allows us make the most of their educational experiences rather than float through learning something.
What i particularly love about a learning plan is it can easily be summarized at a ‘top’ level to include your objectives, goals and what resources you aim to use, and then the ‘detailed’ level for what you do learn and your notes as part of your course - a structure suited to you and what your learning, for example a programming language, and importantly, a section for reflection and even tests (like with queue cards - particularly important if your learning something that has an exam). They don’t have to be perfect and continuously evolve.
The magic of a learning plan is the intention around it and the forward momentum you find yourself on because of the structure you create for yourself. You are setting a growth plan with purpose, and even some minor thinking and small habit changes can help us feel good about the direction we are going in, showing thoughtfulness and a growth mindset around our careers.
You’ll likely find that when you create a plan, you start to get clear about your goals, focus, and direction, which gives you motivation so you have something to do and see improvements from the projects. It is useful to update them based on these periods of reflection.
Learning plans should be customized to suit you! Learning plans should be tailored to individual preferences, learning styles, and career aspirations, making them highly personalized tools for growth.
In this project, we are going to go walkthrough using AI to create such as a plan that will help provide the structure that you can use to be your compass when navigating the journey of learning.
Using AI to draft your learning plans
You could build your learning plan from scratch, and there is no problem.
Personal AI tools like ChatGPT are a fantastic way to save time, provide you with new ideas, and create a draft of such a plan. Additionally, because many of these tools have access to some underlying data, i.e. ChatGPT will already know some core principles of what a learning plan is, you don't have to provide it data; you can also use it as a starting point to springboard into understanding key terms and definitions before researching them deeper yourself to get more understanding.
The prompts in this project can be used with ChatGPT or a similar AI tool. Remember the usuals for Generative AI - it should be used to draft and you should check essential things. Even with the same prompts, it is unlikely you'll get the exact same answer twice, so if you follow along with the prompts below, don't be surprised if my output doesn't match the same system output you get.
An starter outline
Now we know what the general idea of learning plan is. Let’s start with a basic outline structure.
The one below is loosely inspired by Tim Ferris (DiSSS)
Identify a topic or a thing to learn.
Break down the skill into subskills
Refine that research
Create a schedule such as ‘Week 1’ and ‘Week 2’ etc
Complete a project or ‘thing’ as something to work on - how would you practice what you learn?
Put it all together
Remember frameworks are only a starting point. Providing your not creating this plan as part of a specific assignment which has to follow a specific structure and your doing this for your own personal growth, remember to just not get tied to too much on the structure unless that is your thing, and go with the flow. Be empowered to tailor it or change it based on your unique learning style, available time, and resources. Regularly assess your progress, celebrate achievements, and be flexible in adjusting the plan as needed.
This outline is a great start. Before we start using AI, the first item, identifying what you want to learn is the biggest item - you should have a sense of what you want to learn already and should be chosen by you.
Expand your Learning Plan Draft with AI prompts
You should have identified what you want to learn (soft skill or technical skill) and got a decent idea about what a learning plan is and what it aims to do using the content above.
Remember you should have a note taking application ready to be able to construct the plan from the information you begin to learn about. Not just copy and paste but actually review the information, validate important parts and then use what you want to, to craft your plan. The plan itself is the output made by you.
Following the structure template above, let’s run through an example.
Identifying a topic or thing to learn
This one doesn’t really need a prompt or much explanation. Identify what you want to learn. This can be a human or soft skill, like ‘How to give feedback’ or a literal or technical skill like a product, such as ‘Procreate’.
In this example, let’s use the example ‘Procreate’. For those of you not familiar with Procreate, it is a popular art application on Apple iPads.
Complete some initial search
Its also a good idea to get a baseline understanding to see if you can explore terminology or words that may be new to you. The challenge when learning something new is ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’. So the aim here is to try and find out as much as you can so you ‘know what you don’t know’.
Try these prompts, where {thing} is switched out for the thing your learning:
Prompt: What type of thing is {thing}
Prompt: What are the key skills needed to learn {thing your learning}
Prompt: If you could reduce that to 5 items, what would be the absolutely essential skills a beginner must learn?
Prompt: Build me a beginners foundation course for {thing} aimed at somebody who does not know {thing} and has never done {thing}
These prompts should give you an output (or completion) good enough with base line of terminology and things to work with.
For example…
I asked ChatGPT these questions above and replaced the word ‘thing’ in the prompts above with ‘Procreate’ and ‘drawing’ in some cases.
I learned what the type of program Procreate is is a raster graphics editor and what raster graphics are. Procreate is known for it’s user friendly interface, wide range of brushes and tools, high res canvas and layer management. It’s exclusive to the ipad platform, mostly using the apple pencil as input.
When I asked what key skills I needed to learn the Procreate application it provided a list which contained: Familiarity with the interface, drawing and sketching, layer management, brush customization, colour theory, selection and transformation, text and typography, use of masks, gesture controls, exporting and sharing, time lapse recording, understanding procreate updates, integration, community engagement and continuous practice.
When asked to reduce that list to 5 items, the results were: Basic Interface Navigation, Fundamental Drawing Techniques, Layer Management, Brush Customization and Colour Handling. I asked the same questions slightly differently, choosing to go small and ask to expand, and go larger, and refine.
Then when I asked ChatGPT to make a beginners course, I got a structured version of mostly what was previously provided, however in a much more detailed way, with lessons broken down into topics such as ‘Layers and Undo Functions’ and then this was broken down into ‘Introduction to Layers’ and ‘Undo and Redo Functions’.
I also tested out how prescriptive it could be, so I asked ‘How do I create a new canvas in procreate’ and it gave me a list of instructions to follow in a numbered list to create a new canvas in the procreate application.
This gave me a ton of things to begin with. The course layout was particularly useful. I am sure I can develop more in depth, but as a beginner in this space, the data that was output seems logical and all seem introductory like topics and typical things I’d expect.
To validate some of those items, I searched for some real online courses on Procreate.
Refine that research
In the previous task, I got lots of data which is great. Remember it’s about expanding the ‘don’t know what you don’t know’ to ‘know what you don’t know’. So now I know alot of stuff I should probably know if I want to learn procreate.
Time to take a look at that data and organize it into a refined list.
An example is one of the suggestions was ‘Familiarity with the Interface’. This seems logical as being one of the first steps. I can now ask more specific prompts to ChatGPT to ask things like:
Prompt: Tell me about the procreate application’s interface
This prompt is entirely specific to the example, and so you’d need to tailor your prompt in the same way. Begin with ‘Tell me’ or ‘Give me a simple introduction to..’ type prompts.
Additionally remember you're not anchored to just using AI. Something as simple as an interface I can either go look at myself in the application or find images using a search engine. This way I’m beginning to expand on my knowledge of this currently unknown topic and can ask AI more targeted questions.
Remember there is work for you to do with this information to sort it and format it. Take your research and put this into a note taking application where you want to build your learning plan.
What you should have is a formatted list of what topics you want to include in your initial learning plan. It would be helpful if you include a list of topics and any subtopics or areas. I found it useful to also go through a few refinements of that list.
Create a schedule
Now you have a list of essential topics to begin with, you could just run with this, but it would be helpful to break it down into some sort of timeframe. Before you do this, it’s good to get a starting point using AI and see what would be recommended.
What would be the first three things a beginner focused on learning {thing} should focus on?
The responses were familiarization with the interface and basic tools, basic drawing techniques and layers.
In relation to the timeframe, this is about when you start to look at creating a habit for your new topic of learning.
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, has a lot of content on setting habits, but simply put, one of his best recommendations I have found is to go to the lowest common denominator of the thing your looking to do. In this example of me learning the procreate application, this could simply look like, open procreate every day. Seems small right, but the idea that James’s explains is it’s about getting you to the destination and creating regularity in it. This is especially important for people who find it hard starting something new.
For example…
I want to set the habit of drawing something every day in procreate, even if it’s something small and silly, like a bumble bee. I could use what I am aiming to learn that week or month together with my daily habit.
Plan, Set and Complete a project (can easily be done at a subtask or task level)
When drafting a learning plan, it is always good to have some specific projects or thing to work on so you can begin practicing the thing your trying to learn. Using some of the terminology and new concepts you have learned, you can begin to develop prompts around this, such as:
Prompt: What can be some projects I can work on which can help me develop {enter skill} skills in {software}
Put it all together
Now you have a good understanding of all the things you don’t know, some prioritization and you have thought about your schedule, what habits you want to create and what potential projects you can begin to work towards.
Document this information in a small or large plan, depending on your preference. You can use your favourite search engine if you want to find a format which appeals to you, but I have found a simple framework used best and to not to caught up in it:
Starter Habit: Open procreate every day
Goal habit: One drawing every day (e.g. draw a bumble bee every day)
Week 1: {topic}
{blurb/some information about the topic}
Week 2: {topic}
{blurb/some information about the topic}
etc.
Project ideas:
{Project ideas}
I can now continue my search, follow up on some other resources like artists across the internet and look for courses and other resources in these areas to begin to create a library of reference points and my own curated knowledge.
Summary
Learning something new can be daunting and challenging. We often think it’s a monumental task, but using a simple learning plan framework and using AI as a sounding board to provide structure and information where it’s available is a fantastic starting point to point you in an informed direction of what you want to learn - breaking down the massive ‘thing’ for you into easily digestible parts.
The important thing here is this is all just a starting point
You need to source the information and tutorials, knowledge, etc., for your learning plan. For my example with Procreate, I would need to look for courses that covered the specific things I wanted to learn such as layering and colour theory. I have the most important thing now set - forward momentum.
I hope this has helped bring structure to your learning journey!