I don't. I let my path in front of me determine what I learn. One of the biggest practical lessons I learned after leaving college is that most of the things I

I don't. I let my path in front of me determine what I learn. One of the biggest practical lessons I learned after leaving college is that most of the things I learned in college are useless to me now. The philosophical lesson was that study plans and syllabi are useful, but only as a list of things you might need to know...a way of knowing what you don't know (which is very important!). But as a way of determining what you learn, you're just going to waste your time. Let your path in front of you determine which of those things you don't know is the thing you need to learn. My educational background is Supply Chain Management. My career path forked within my first professional job as a supply chain analyst due to the simple constraint that Excel at the time wouldn't let me systematically manage inventory settings for more than 65k unique inventory SKUs. That is how I ended up learning R and SQL...my first programming languages in a long list to come. Now I manage radiofrequency sprectrum analytics for a major cellular network provider, and I algotrade commodity futures on the side. Getting from there to here was a long path of letting my current needs determine what I needed to learn. Additionally, perhaps anecdotally, concepts that you learn have much better staying power in your memory when you have an actual need to learn them.