Ask HN: How to receive recognition or credit for self-learned material?

2 points by upgrayedd 15 years ago | 2 comments

I've been studying on my own for awhile now from great resources like the MIT OCW offerings, Stanford series of lectures on Youtube, and great content from places like Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard's CS50.tv, UNSW, and other places online.

I've learned a ton starting from basically 0 programming and algorithm experience to being farely competent in a few languages, design patterns and algorithms, as well as the math that I've missed for awhile. I'm currently self-learning Discrete Maths with OCW, Khan Academy, and books from the library.

I learn in my free time and it's been amazing. For support, I often use OpenStudy.com's amazing community, especially for math and computer science things. I'm planning on ramping up my experience and practice by starting to participate in open source projects (the folks at #openhatch on freenode and openhatch.org have been amazing here), as well as getting a portfolio of projects on github.

I've run into sort of a conundrum that I knew I'd have to face sooner or later -- how exactly do I receive recognition and get credit for what I've been learning for the last couple of years? I could always put it under education and experience on my resume, but are there pointers that people on HN can give on how exactly I can prove I know and learned the things I say I have?

I really appreciate that we live in a time where anyone can get a world-class education for free (almost all in the local public library and free time at home/after work) from some of the best institutions in the world like this. Even better (imho) is the amazing help and collaboration provided by the OpenStudy and OpenHatch communities.

retroafroman 15 years ago |

You could simply tell current and potential employers that you enjoy learning and gaining new knowledge. I think you could do better than that, however.

I think the best way to show off self obtained knowledge in a resume is to turn the knowledge into experience, and list it in a "Skills" section of a resume. An example is to learn all about virtualization, then set up a whole lab of virtual machines and practice setting up, shutting down, managing VMs. Pure knowledge subjects like higher math is more difficult to show this way.

An even better way is to have projects, and list those as well. If you leverage your coding knowledge/experience and make a web app, list that. If it's a project that they've heard of (even if it was just viral for a short period of time) that's a huge bonus. Also, committing to popular open source projects is a big way to show off that you know how to code as well.

While it is certainly awesome to be proud of learning and knowledge, employers want to know what you can DO, not so much what you KNOW. Turn knowledge into an experience and it will be more valuable, and you'll know it better.

stray 15 years ago |

Why even worry about getting credit for it? Your life is richer for having learned things you didn't know before.

And frankly, I'd hire an autodidact over a college graduate any day.