Advice to a Young ERP Consultant Part 7:

Build Your Personal Information System

This series has a lot of learning advice: Use a T-shaped Learning Approach, Learn your Niche, Learn at Levels, Learn by Doing, Learn from Errors. But what are you supposed to do with all the learning you accumulate?

Advice Part 7: Build Your Personal Information System

As you learn how your ERP works - high level business concepts, happy path sales demos, and in the weeds configurations - take notes and screenshots and save them in your Personal Information System.

What is a Personal Information System*?

You want to create a place to store your notes for future reference, and you want that place to be searchable.

The specific tool doesn't matter - Word, a Google Doc, OneNote, Evernote, some other digital notetaking system - any of these are acceptable. IMO OneNote/Evernote are better suited to the task, but don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

Don't make temporary notes to study for some certification test. Take notes to build an asset that will benefit you throughout your consulting career. Think of this as a compounding resource you are gifting your future self.

A key insight while building your Personal Information System: Copy and paste are not a replacement for thinking.

This isn't a place to pin every blogpost you skim while you put off work by trolling your LinkedIn feed (I see you😜). Remember: you won't learn your ERP by reading about it, though part of your notebook may be a queue of posts and courses you'd like to study in detail later.

Think of notes and screenshots in your Personal Information System as documentation of the work you're doing to learn in your ERP.

*I would abbreviate this, but the acronym is undesirable. Perhaps I need to rethink the name.