Learning as part of your job

In Part of your job should be to learn Karl Seguin’s response to the question

Something I don't see being addressed that often - When you say you read a lot, is that on your own time, or do you actually spend time at work reading? I think spending time at work reading & learning is justifiable, although not always easy.

is that learning should ABSOLUTELY be part of your job and I completely agree. As professional developers we have to keep our skills current, we have to keep sharpening our saws to remain effective; techniques evolve (frighteningly) quickly and unless we learn new approaches we will lose both productivity and (probably) motivation. The best way to learn something is to practice it and practice it often which really means some portion of my working day is spent reading blogs or experimenting with something new, after work is after work – its family time. I do spend some time after work reading and working on other projects but these are for my own gain, I read the NHibernate blogs at work because they are directly relevant to my job, but I read the New Scientist at home because I’m just curious about what’s happening and think pictures of space are cool.

As Karl says in his post you should discuss learning at work with your manager, finding out how to implement some new technique will often mean a trip to Google and some time reading to understand what is going on and I think this is expected these days. But I know some companies monitor the internet usage of their employees and excessive surfing can be viewed unfavourably, so making sure that people are ok with you spending an hour or so a week working on a private project or helper library that has no direct benefit to your main project is really covering your a$$.

Also you have to establish how you learn most effectively, some people learn best through instruction, others through experimentation – but in all cases I think there comes a point where you have to just stop reading about it and do it.