At its heart, every CX article, convention, course, and book has the same goal. It’s the same goal we have at CX by Design: Help people get better at CX. We’ve approached this subject through the lens of promoting CX adoption in your company and growing CX maturity across your organization.
But let’s talk about you. As a CX professional, how can you grow your skills?
Setting CX priorities (again)
One of the best things about CX is that it’s multi-disciplinary: there’s always something new to learn or try. But this can also make it harder to grow your CX skills. It’s easy to become so distracted (or overwhelmed) by all you want to improve. If that happens (and it does all the time), you sacrifice real progress in one area to pick up a surface understanding of several others.
So, how can you focus your CX growth?
We recommend using the Now-Next-Later framework described in an earlier newsletter. (Quick tip: If you missed that or any other issue of the CX by Design Ideas newsletter, you can catch up using our free online archive.) We’ve given detailed instructions on how to do that in the Bite-Sized CX section below.
Choosing a learning path
Now that you’ve narrowed down your skill list, how do you go about achieving mastery?
There are many possible opportunities here: getting help from a senior CX person or mentor, taking an online course through Coursera or LinkedIn Learning (among others), watching a YouTube video, signing up for a college course, attending a conference, reading a book or article, and so on.
Here’s a secret: the only thing that matters about how you get your information is that it’s reputable and accurate. Everything else is down to your learning style, timeline, and budget. So, instead of agonizing over the merits of reading a book vs. watching a lecture, pick one and do it. If the book’s too boring, put it down and watch the video. If the video doesn’t give you the information you need, read the book.
Practically, attending a conference or a college course is often time-bound and expensive; that’s why many professionals choose online or self-paced learning. But that doesn’t mean one avenue is better than another. As we often tell our clients: start where you are and iterate as you need to.
Both of us are lifelong learners. We love that CX gives us so many opportunities to broaden our knowledge. And that knowledge has never been more available than it is now.
So, we’ve expanded this month’s 'Around the Web' section. It includes several great CX resources as well as the usual interesting articles. Happy learning!
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