While I definitely feel investing in one's self is worthwhile. I am not sure if this is the right approach to think about the issue. The author compares the % of what companies spend on R&D and correlates that with what an individual should spend on educational material per year.<p>I'd be more inclined to say it should be a % of your time. Instead of 5% of your salary, perhaps 5% minimum of your time per year should be spent towards learning. Though probably more is better? It'd be an easy trap to get into of spending 5% on "education/R&D" and not actually fully leveraging or utilizing it. One could blow that easily on a VM or server and some books and just feel like they've accomplished something when in reality they have barely leveraged what they have. Though if you are pursuing free/low cost education material, that small costs here and there shouldn't be fretted over.
The article assumes all learning is academic from authorities and never from doing. WRT doing at only $280/mon at a reasonable billing rate I could burn thru my learning budget on a saturday afternoon and barely keep up with the times much less get ahead.<p>The other problem is it assumes all learning is of the mind, but if you get it in your head to get involved in physical aspects of the field, then some FPGA boards and oscilloscopes and next thing you know you've blown your budget until 2030 unless you're careful. Arguably even "mind only" developers who buy anything more than a raspberry pi should account for their annual $3000 mac laptop and $500 phone (and its $1200/yr of phone service) and pretty soon you have no budget left over just buying hardware alone.
This made me think of an earlier study performed by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.<p>Strategy&, a business unit within PriceWaterhouseCoopers, has been publishing an annual report of the top 1000 most innovative companies in the world for over 12 years. In that time, they have found that there is no statistically significant relationship between R&D spending and sustained financial performance[0]. This finding applies to total R&D spend, as well as R&D spending as a percent of revenues.[1]<p>Spending on R&D is not related to growth in sales or profits, increases in market capitalization or shareholder returns.[2] In every annual report that Strategy& have published, the top 10 most innovative companies are often not the top 10 spenders on R&D.<p>[0] AlisonSmith(2014 ). R &Dspendingunlinkedtofinancialperformance,studyshows. T heFinancialTimes.
<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/cdfe1b2c-5abf-11e4-b449-00144feab7de#axzz3I5ez9PAL" rel="nofollow">https://www.ft.com/content/cdfe1b2c-5abf-11e4-b449-00144feab...</a><p>[1] BarryJaruzelski,JohnLoehr,andRichardHolman(2014). T heGlobalInnovation1000:ProvenPathstoInnovationSuccess.
<a href="http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00295" rel="nofollow">http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00295</a><p>[2] BarryJaruzelski,JohnLoehr,andRichardHolman(2012). T heGlobalInnovation1000:MakingIdeasWork
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