I've spoken to a couple of friends recently about testers they know who continually express a desire to "learn automation" and continually fail to begin learning anything at all. A common behaviour is to find something that blocks the goal. For one friend, the testers wanted a course on automation and ring-fenced time each week to work on it. Without those, they said, it was obvious that no learning could happen. For the other friend, an interesting natural experiment had taken place. There had been a couple of weeks at his place where the wiki, task management system, and source control service had been unavailable. Staff who usually complained about not having time to study anything because they were too busy moving an endless stream of tickets across boards were told to spend that time on self-learning. Do you think they mostly did? No need to answer. I can empathise. From a standing start a distant goal can look very intimidating. Of course putting off starting does...