There are many ways to learn a subject. You can take a course. You can read about it. You can study it online or in a library. Or you can learn about it in a conference.

Most people do not use a conference in this way. They go to conferences in fields that they are very familiar with, and they listen to the lecturers speak.

This might be a waste of a great deal of time. After all, if you already are fully familiar with the subject, what are you going to gain by going to that conference?

A better way is to go to a conference in fields in which you have no background. Listen to the lecturers speak and you will learn a great deal. You might even ask some foolish questions, if you're not too proud, and you'll learn a great deal from that.

After the conference, you'll be able to go on and study the areas in which you were not familiar with the things that were said. You can go to the usual course, the usual areas for studying them.

The next time you go to a conference in a related area you will be that much more familiar with this subject but you will have heard it from the best experts. You will hear it from a place in which everybody went there in order to listen, with an enraptured audience, or at least a courteous audience, which may not have been in a classroom, and you can be reasonably sure that the information that you hear is correct because a second-rate person would not speak there.

This differs from a course in which you have no guarantee that your teacher is of the level that you would need, the level that is best.

But, you may say, the material is over your head and you might not understand it.

Of course you won't understand it. There will be a lot that you will miss. However, if you are interested enough then you will be able to learn a lot about things and you will be able to get the background that is needed in order to be able to complete your knowledge with further studies.

This is the way that the author of this article became a computer consultant without ever having taken a computer course in his life and he now advises others in the way to use their computer