We're coming up on the middle of the year, and I wonder if you are improving your career this year? Did you make plans and are you sticking to them? I've been tracking progress on my goals, and so far mediocre progress.

It's tough to learn, but even tougher to learn when you don't have a specific focus. Choosing to "get better at T-SQL" isn't a good goal. It's vague and hard to measure. To me, you need to pick some specific areas to focus on and then develop some goals on what you want to accomplish. For example, you might want to learn to work with APPLY and convert some queries from joins to APPLY or pick a series of challenging problems that you can solve with that operator.

Mental note: make some lists of problems to solve.

These days there are so many areas that you could focus on when working with data that it can be overwhelming to try and pick something. If you were to think about what you want to learn today, what's the list of things you think you need to learn?

If you have that list, then can you choose a few specific things that will help you measure your progress? I've picked a few, but not enough to measure tightly. That's something I need to change for next year, with some ways to measure myself better.

If you are working on growing your skills, share some ideas on how to improve your career and skills. What types of things help you get better? Maybe more important, what things do you think are important to learn and why?