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In the last post, I described how I used social media, in particular this blog and Twitter, to broadcast the notes for the study group I held for the CAPM/PMP exam prep class we put on when I was the Director of Certification at the Project Management Institute (PMI) Chicagoland Chapter.

What I want to do in this post is discuss the Feynman Technique, which is named after the famous physicist Richard Feynman:

1. Choose a topic and study it–the best way is to combine reading about it, writing about it, and speaking about it.
2. Teach the topic to beginners, which will force you to explain the concepts you have studied in simple language, and often resorting to other methods (pictures, analogies, stories) to get it across.
3. Identify gaps in your knowledge uncovered in the previous step. This will often come from the questions you are asked by the beginners. What is that you aren’t you able to explain, either because you yourself don’t understand it, or because you don’t yet have the language to explain it simply to others?
4. Review the original sources you studied from in step 1, and simplify what you are teaching.

I didn’t realize until years later that this was in effect the technique I had been using all along in my blog. The first step was taking the source material for project management, the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and going through it chapter by chapter, section by section, trying to simplify the language as much as possible.

These are the notes that I wrote for the people who were in the study group, which was the second step listed above. If they missed a study session, I would just refer them to the notes. However, in the actual session (this was all done via conference call–these were in the days before Zoom calls), I would save the last 10 minutes or so for questions, and this is where step 3 came in.

I would get questions from the PMI members who were in the class, and sometimes I could answer the question, but sometimes I would get stumped. Sometimes it was because I myself was unclear on the subject, but in other cases, I just needed to work on the way I explained the concepts so that they understood what I had in my mind. When I came across a stumbling block, someone who didn’t understand that explanation, I had to think of analogies or pictures to make the concept clearer. This is the fourth step when you review and revise your earlier explanation. In any case, I would put that simplified explanation in the blog post and, from the feedback I was getting from readers, I could tell that in most cases, I had added value by making the PMBOK Guide material more understandable.

In one case, the PMBOK Guide had a complicated diagram explaining the different types of stakeholders on a project and I ended up using a simpler diagram using a set of concentric circles. This ended up being used in a later addition of the PMBOK Guide itself, so somebody who had seen my blog must have been on the editorial committee that put together the new version.

It’s success can be measured by the fact that I’ve had 2.5 million views from 1.5 million people, all from a total of 195 different countries, in the years since I launched the blog. Although I stopped writing content during the pandemic of 2020, I still get people looking up articles on my blog. My most circulated post was on the subject of scope creep, using the 1928 St. Francis Dam disaster as an example.

So since the Feynman technique was successful, in my estimation, let’s fast forward it to today. I completed my Associate’s Degree in Cybersecurity at University of Maryland Global Campus back in July of this year (2023), and I was talking to an HR professional I know about how to go about searching for a job in this new field.

He suggested that I, of course, update my resume and update my LinkedIn profile, with a job description from an entry-level position in cybersecurity as a focal point for shaping both of them. But when he saw on my resume that I had posted my 4squareviews professional blog as a reference, he discussed with me the idea of revitalizing my blog, but this time focusing on Information Technology, with an emphasis on Cybersecurity.

Our university recommended the following sequence of certifications:

1. CompTIA IT Fundamentals (optional)

2. CompTIA A+

3. CompTIA Network+

4. CompTIA Security+

5. Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)

6. CompTIA Cybersecurity Analyst (CySA)

7. EC-Council Certified Secure Computer User

8. EC-Council Certified Incident Handler

to which a colleague at work added the following:
9. AWS Cloud Practitioner

You would probably consider 1 to be an entry level IT certification, and 9 to be an entry level AWS certification. You can consider A+ to be higher level of the same broad knowledge you gain with ITF, focusing on hardware and software.

Just call these level 1 certifications just to categorize them. Network+ and Security+ are the next level where you go into depth not about individual computers, but networks of computers and how to protect them against cyberattacks. I’ll call these level 2 certifications. Level 3 would be the certifications listed after that.

So, what I discussed with my HR “advisor” is that, in the next few months while I am pursuing the ITF, AWS Cloud Practitioner, and then the Security+ certifications (skipping A+ and Network+ for now), that I take the notes that I have been accumulating in preparation for these exams and post them on my 4squareviews blog, with the aim towards simplifying the concepts, or if they are a list of items to memorize, coming up with easier ways to commit them to memory.

In this case, the text I am using is the “All-In-One” series of textbooks, for the following reason.

They all come connected to an online classroom version on Udemy, although the textbook material is a LOT more thorough. So I’ll do the following for the IT Fundamentals exam.

1. Complete the Udemy course, including all of the chapter quizzes. (done)

2. Go through the All-In-One textbook, taking notes for each chapter and doing the chapter quizzes (done)

3. I’ll now take those notes (done with the Evernotes app) and rewrite them on my blog, simplifying and clarifying along the way. In this way, I am not in trouble with copywrite laws because I am not copying word for word (giving references to the text so people know where I got it from), but rather shaping it into my own words, adding elements such as timelines, charts, photos, etc., to make the material more accessible.

With the AWS material, I’m debating to use Cloud Academy or CloudWolf as my source for the study material.

When you get to the A+, Network+ and Security+, there is another great supplemental source, that of the materials done by Professor Messer.

It seems strange to use the blog to, in essence, pretend I am teaching a subject when I am actually in the process of learning it, but the Feynman technique will assure that I am understanding the subject at a deeper level than just rote memorization. After all, a future employer will want to know whether my paper certifications just show a surface knowledge of the subject or a deeper understanding of it.

It’s the latter I am aiming for, and that’s what I intend to do with IT and cybersecurity in particular. So here’s to the re-launching of this blog, but in a different direction! We all must start someway on our way to mastering a subject, and I choose THIS to be my starting place for IT!

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When I was the Director of Certification at the Project Management Institute IPMI) in the Chicagoland area a little less than a decade ago, I embarked on a project to put all of my notes for our CAPM/PMP Certification study groups onto this website. I wanted to relate the story about how that project took place and show how I was unwittingly following the formula for what is referred to as The Feynman Technique of self study in a new field.

Then I want to announce that I am embarking on a new project that follows the same technique, but in a new field, namely, that of Information Technology.

Part I–The Project Management blog

I started at PMI as an assistant to the Director of Certification, helping him by figuring out a way to improve the experience of members who wanted to get certified either at the entry level, with the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) certification exam, or at the professional level, with the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam. The two exams both covered the material in the Project Management Body of Knowledge or PMBOK, but at two different levels. The CAPM exam asked questions based on the information contained in the various chapters of PMBOK, but the PMP exam went further and asked situational questions asking what a person should do in the scenario presented.

The exams also differed in terms of the requirements to take them: the CAPM had a minimal experience requirement of the completion of a secondary school degree plus 23 hours of project management education, which were covered by the exam prep course we offered through DeVry Tech.

The PMP, on the other hand, has stricter requirements: 60 months of leading projects if you have completed a secondary school degree, or 36 months if you have completed a 4-year college degree program. It also requires 35 hours of project management education instead of the 23 for the CAPM, but our Chicagoland chapter combined the CAPM/PMP exam prep into one unified course that, if you took it and completed it, would fulfill the education requirement for either exam.

When I was at the Orange County, CA chapter, also acting as the assistant to the Director of Certification, we ran the course as a chapter, with project managers taking turns to teach the various classes that we put on. I got involved because the previous year, I had taken and passed the CAPM exam, but found that the study groups were not organized as well as I would have liked. I mentioned my list of suggested improvements to the Director and he asked me to become his assistant and put in place some of those improvements I suggested. That’s how I got involved in putting on the same course that I had just taken the year before.

At the PMI Chicagoland chapter, however, we did NOT run the study group ourselves because the Chicagoland chapter was so much bigger than the Orange County chapter, both in terms of the number of members and the geographical scope of the chapter. The course itself was run by our business partner, DeVry Tech, which put on the program a couple of times a year. I suggested to the Chicagoland Director of Certification that we become more involved in the running of study groups running concurrently or shortly after the exam prep course was completed. We tried a couple of locations, and ran the study groups out of local libraries, but didn’t have many of the members show up.

When I became the Director of Certification the following year, after the previous Director had moved on to another leadership position in the chapter, I came up with a solution: why not have a VIRTUAL study group rather than a physical one?

So that’s what I did: I offered a study group twice a week, once during the week and once on a weekend day in order to accommodate people’s schedules. I would go over the material covered in the exam prep course, but gave an opportunity for members to ask questions of anything they didn’t understand. This was extremely valuable for my own understanding of the material, but because their questions forced me to clarify and simplify the material presented in the PMBOK Guide.

Invariably, someone would miss a class and ask me for my notes for the study group discussion they had missed. Keeping track of what class they missed so I could send the appropriate set of notes proved irksome, so I decided to just post them online. I had already started my own professional blog (4squareviews), which you’re reading right now, so I posted them there.

Although they were meant for the PMI Chicagoland members who were studying for the CAPM/PMP certification exams, they were put out there on the Internet, and thus came up in searches by people elsewhere who were studying for the exam.

I posted notes on the 4th Edition of the PMBOK Guide, and then as the Guide was changed by PMI to the 5th Edition and 6th Edition, I included notes on those versions as well. In the 6th Edition, I emphasized how the character of process of running a regular project according to PMBOK was influenced by the growing field of Agile Project Management.

Over the years my readership increased, to the point where I now have had the following traffic to my site:
–2.5 million views
–1.5 million visitors
–195 countries

I was active on producing content for the site until the beginning of 2020, when I was trying to do a radio program on project management called Chicago’s Rollout with my co-host Bert Howard. However, the pandemic soon put an end to that project, and then in the fall of 2020, I started in a new direction as I embarked upon an Associate’s Degree Program in Cybersecurity at the University of Maryland Global Campus. Working a full-time job at Amazon as a Process Assistant at a Fulfillment Center in University Park, IL AND going to school meant I was too busy on the days off of work doing homework for my classes to further pursue writing active content on my 4squareviews blog.

I graduated in July 2023 with an Associate’s Degree, having been listed on the Dean’s List every year of the program, and having been nominated to the Tau Chapter of the Alpha Sigma Lambda Honors Society for my achievement in that program.

So, what’s next? I plan on entering the Bachelor’s Degree extension of my Cybersecurity Degree in January, but in the five remaining months, I have been thinking about reviving my 4squareviews professional blog but in my new chosen field of Cybersecurity. Looking back on the success of my blog in the field of Project Management, I have reflected that part of its success was my unwitting adoption of what is called the Feynman Technique for self-study, named after the famous physicist Professor Richard Feynman who invented it as a way to further his own understanding of physics through the teaching of that subject to beginners, namely, the freshmen who came to study physics at his university.

It occurred to me that, while I am spending the next few months focusing on certifications for Information Technology, namely, the IT Fundamentals exam and the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam, I could take the notes that I have been accumulating on my Evernote app and put them on my blog going forward. Maybe my own stumbling towards mastery of this new field could help others who are entering the field.

Part II of this post will cover what the Feynman Technique entails and how my project of publishing my CAPM/PMP study group notes ended up following that technique.

Part III of this post will cover the plans I have for reproducing the success of my Project Management content on this blog in my new field of Information Technology and Cybersecurity in particular.

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