Solution architects need to continually absorb new knowledge and enhance their skill set to help the organization in better decision making. Continuous learning keeps you relevant and builds confidence. It opens up your mind and changes prospects. Learning could be challenging with a full-time job and a busy family life. Continuous learning is about developing the habit of always learning something new, whereby you have to be motivated and disciplined. You first need to set up learning goals and apply effective time management to achieve them. This often slips through the net when you get busy with regular daily work.

Everyone has their own style of learning. Some people may like formal education; some may read books; others may want to listen to and watch tutorials. You need to find the learning style that is most effective for you and suited to your lifestyle. For example, you can choose to listen to audiobooks and tutorials when commuting to work. You can read books during a business-trip flight or watch video tutorials during exercise hours in the gym. Overall, you need to make some adjustments to put time aside from your busy work life for continuous learning. Here are some of the ways to engage yourself in constant learning:

• Learning new technologies, frameworks, and languages by trying them out: Solution architects are the builders and are ready to experiment hands-on. As a successful solution architect, you need to keep learning new technologies by building a small POC. Getting an understanding of modern programming languages and frameworks will help you to provide the best advice on technology adoption for an organization and team. 

• Learning new skills by reading books and tutorials: Online learning has brought a revolution and has made it easy to learn and dive deep in any area. You now have massive knowledge bases at your fingertips, to learn anything. An online platform such as Udemy or Coursera provides thousands of video tutorial courses in all areas that you can watch online or download to your device for offline learning.

Similarly, there are millions of books available in Kindle to read anytime and anywhere. Audiobook platforms such as Audible and Google Play's audiobooks can help you to listen to the book during your commute. There are so many convenient resources available that there is no excuse not to apply continuous learning.

• Keeping up with technology news and developments by reading articles on websites and blogs: The best way to keep yourself updated with technology trends is by subscribing to technical news and blogs. TechCrunch.com, Wired.com, and Cnet.com are some of the popular websites to get the latest technology trends. A major newspaper such as CNBC or The New York Times, BBC News and CNN channels, and so on have technology articles that give a good insight into industry trends. You can subscribe to blogs for new learning in the respective technology area. For example, for cloud platform learning, you can subscribe to Amazon Web Services (AWS) blogs, which has thousands of articles and use cases in the area of AWS Cloud, and similar blogs are available from other public clouds such as Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

• Writing your blog, whitepaper, and book: Sharing knowledge is the best way to learn as you think through use cases when trying to present to others. Publishing blogs and articles in popular blog-publishing platforms such as medium.com, Blogger, and Tumblr helps you to share your learning and also learn from others. Active participation in question-and-answer platforms helps you to find an alternative solution for any given problem. Some popular question/answer platforms are Quora, Reddit, StackOverflow, Stack Exchange, and so on.

• Solidify your knowledge by teaching others: Teaching others helps you to collaborate and get a different perspective of your knowledge. Often, use cases asked by participants give you different ways of finding a solution. Running a full-day workshop with a hands-on lab and concept building helps you to solidify your learning and learn with others.

• Taking online classes: Sometimes, you want to go for formal learning to be more disciplined, and you want to be flexible. Online courses provide flexibility and help you to adjust to other priorities and save time. Online courses can offer you an organized way to learn new technology and help to enhance knowledge. 

• Learning from teammates: Teammates share the same context, and you spend most of the day with them. Learning with team members can help to speed up your learning. The team can adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy whereby each team member can share the topics among them and present dive-deep brown-bag sessions. Brown-bag sessions are a standard method used by many organizations to conduct regular learning sessions among team members. Each team member shares their new learning in a weekly brown-bag learning session, and everyone quickly learns new topics.
• Attending and participating in user groups and conferences: All large vertical industry and technology organizations conduct a conference to provide insight on new technology trends and hands-on sessions. Participating in industry conferences and user group meetings helps to develop networking and understand technology trends. Some of the large technology conferences from industry leaders include AWS re:Invent, Google Cloud Next, Microsoft Ignite, SAP SAPPHIRE, Strata Data conference, and so on. You can create a local user group and conduct a meet-up in your local area, which will help you to collaborate with professionals across industries and organizations.

A solution architect plays a technical leadership role, and a good leadership warrant to prepare more leaders like you, which is possible through mentorship. Solution architects should play a player-coach role and mentor others. Let's look at this in more detail.