I have always liked to learn. I was that kid in school who actually liked to do his homework. I spent a lot of my time at the library, looking at the book stacks and reading different books. I would check out as many books as I could each time to bring home and read.
The other day, I was logged into my Udemy account and counted 31 courses I have. I’ve only started a handful. The rest are waiting for me, patiently. Yes, even I find 31 to be a bit excessive. I even had to archive a couple that were so out of date it made no sense to bother with them.
There is more to learning than acquiring new skills. Today, I was thinking about all the things I’ve done over my 25+ year career, and I began to wonder how much knowledge I’ve lost. Especially during the last 7 months, I have been unemployed. I am certain there are some things I did at my previous job that would be harder for me to complete now than they were 7 months ago.
There is a shelf life to knowledge in our brains. Core concepts and general principles hang around long enough, but the detailed stuff—that’s a lot like the complex math we used to do in high school or college. If we do not use it regularly, we tend to lose our ability to perform the necessary skills without a refresher course. I’m sure you’ve heard that old saying, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”
So, I had an idea. Can I use my newly acquired AI-prompting skills to my advantage with fading skill sets? I believe that I can. After working with AI for several months, I can use it to generate skills tests based on tasks I performed in my prior roles.
I am fairly certain I can even use it to help me set up the infrastructure to complete the testing. Today, I used Grok to set up a fully functional Ubuntu 24.04 server on a VPS (virtual private server). Then we installed the necessary components to run the Ghost blogging platform.
I ran into a few snags along the way, and Grok was super useful in helping me work through the errors and get the right fixes in place. After a couple of hours of tinkering, I had my blogging platform up and running. I just have to do the final configuration steps.
I’m sure I can use Grok in much the same way to build out any infrastructure I need, and then have it generate tasks for me to perform as tests. This is something AI can actually be good at. The point of AI is not to do the work for you, but to guide you. If you construct your prompts correctly, AI can serve as a personal tutor, especially for technical topics.
I am going to give this a try and see where it goes. Even if it doesn’t work the way I want, I’ll be learning the ins and outs of working with AI. No matter what I do going forward, that will count for something.
In the meantime, it reminds me of the Parable of the Talents—God entrusts us with what we have, and He expects us to put it to work, even (especially) in the in-between seasons. Unemployment isn’t a pause button; it’s an opportunity to sharpen what’s fading and invest in new tools. So yeah, I’ll keep tinkering, keep prompting, keep growing. And of course, I’ll let you know how it goes—what about you? Got any skills you’re dusting off these days?
—Daniel