Go to the Head of the Class!

It's an article of faith in the new world of work: If you want to keep moving forward, you have to keep learning. More than ever, personal success is about personal growth. That means updating your current skills, acquiring new skills, and adding to the experiences that you have outside of work.

Just a few years ago, being serious about learning meant going to school. Maybe you'd enroll in an MBA program. Maybe you'd attend an executive-education course. Maybe you'd take a class to learn how to operate a new piece of software or to improve your presentation skills. Whatever option you chose, going to school meant leaving your workplace, learning at a pace dictated by your instructors -- and, more often than not, spending lots of money.

No longer. Thanks to the Web, there's more freedom than ever to learn what you want -- when and how you want to learn it. "Learning should come to you," insists Jason Roberts, 36, CEO of Panmedia Corp., the developer of Learn2.com. "Classrooms kill most learning before it can happen."

This edition of @work shares lessons learned by four businesspeople who learn via the Web. You'll also learn the new rules of online learning and find a guide to the best online-university programs -- in short, all of the tools that you need to make the grade.

Learning for a Change

Roll Call: Back in 1995, Kevin A. Krall, now 42, quit his job as a process operator at Kimberly-Clark Corp. He wanted to try his luck on the amateur golf circuit. But after spending a year seeking sponsors and working on his game, Krall gave up golf to pursue a different passion: graphic design. "I fell in love with working on a computer, and I really got into the artistic aspects of it," he says. "I'm a self-taught graphic designer. I knew that if I could get proficient enough and professional enough, my work would eventually find a market."

Core Curriculum: Krall started by designing business cards, site plans, and brochures for small companies, churches, apartment complexes, and self-storage facilities near his home in Austin, Texas. But he didn't yet consider himself a graphic artist -- or even a skilled entrepreneur. To get up to speed, he needed to go to school.

But he didn't have time to enroll in courses at a university or design school -- he had a business to run -- so he looked to the Web. "I had to learn how to work with print shops and service bureaus," he says. "So the first thing I did online was to search for basic information on graphic design and prepress operations. I went in with tunnel vision, but then this door opened and a light came on. I realized that I could learn whatever I wanted to learn."

Since taking those initial steps, Krall has taken more than 40 online courses -- most of them through Ziff-Davis University (www.zdu.com). His course work there has included classes on Visual Basic , Photoshop, Internet-business strategy, and electronic commerce. What he learned along the way led him to refocus his business on the Web and on online-community development; to start his own company, CreativeONE (www.creativeone.com); and, recently, to step in as CEO of WebLucent Inc., a Web service geared toward small businesses.

Making the Grade: Krall says that his biggest online-learning challenge involved figuring out what he wanted to learn. The Web can be too much of a good thing. "Stay focused," he advises. "Don't be overwhelmed by the abundance of information online."

Certain physical tools can enrich the online experience, Krall says. For example, if you're exploring a new area of expertise -- and especially if you're doing so as a free agent -- you'll need to come to terms with the terms used in that field.

Although he found plenty of online dictionaries and glossaries, Krall got a good hard-copy graphic-design dictionary -- so he wouldn't have to visit a different Web site every time he needed a definition. "If you don't understand certain terms, you won't learn well," he says. "Don't be afraid to look up unfamiliar words."

Coordinates: Kevin A. Krall, kevinak@creativeone.com

On-the-Job Learning

Roll Call: For the last 19 years, Wally Warnke, 47, has worked for Motorola. He now works in its computer-integrated-manufacturing division as a software engineer at a facility in Chandler, Arizona. But Warnke has also worked in the company's maintenance and sustaining-engineering divisions. Which means that he has had to learn new skills continuously -- while still on the job. Last fall, Warnke turned to the Web for just-in-time education in a new programming language. "One of our vendors' software uses utilities that are written in Perl," Warnke says. "I needed to modify that software, but I didn't know any Perl."