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by. Sarah Stoner

I’ve been thinking lately about long weekends. Mostly how they have changed in the years since my husband and I moved into a fixer-upper century home here in Cleveland. Spring and summer weekends used to mean juggling barbeques and bonfires…and they still do. But now they also usually mean fitting in a really unexciting house project—like troubleshooting plumbing that was installed during Prohibition.

It’s a love/sigh relationship we have with this old house. The sheer volume of work it requires means that a) we leave the truly scary projects to the professionals, so b) we take on a lot of the smaller ones ourselves…and even those are complicated.

So what makes it possible for us?

It’s our access to really smart people who have niche knowledge about things like plumbing, physics, electricity and engineering. Family, neighbors, co-workers…a lot of times it’s the anytime access to resources we trust online, whose experts post amazing how-to videos. They demonstrate — step-by-step — highly specialized projects, enabling us to take on jobs that we never would have considered with a book or instruction sheet.

This approach to learning is not surprising. I’ve heard similar stories about enterprise content management (ECM) training over the years working closely with our Education Services department, here at Hyland, creator of OnBase. A core tenet of the Education Services philosophy is taking learning to doing. There is just something about a personal connection with the instructor and hands-on exercises that makes the process easier and more motivating, yielding better results.

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