A little over twenty years into a career in software, I went back to university. I’m doing an MSc as an apprenticeship, alongside my full-time job, and I’m far enough into it now to have opinions about it. This post is for two kinds of reader: anyone weighing up doing the same, and anyone curious how a self-confessed sceptic of formal architecture ended up studying it.
Why now
The honest answer is that I like a challenge, and I’ve always believed learning shouldn’t stop because your career has a few years on it. But there was a more specific reason too.
Almost everything I knew about enterprise architecture I’d learned the hard way, by doing it. That works, up to a point. Experience teaches you what went wrong on the systems you happened to work on, with the people you happened to work with. What it doesn’t do is tell you which of your instincts are general truths and which are just the scar tissue from one particularly bad project. I wanted to learn the discipline formally rather than experientially: to find out what the field actually knows, and to test what I thought I knew against it.
If you’ve read I was an enterprise architecture sceptic, you’ll know that’s a slightly loaded thing for me to say. I spent years thinking EA was mostly frameworks and diagrams that never touched a running system. Going back to study it properly was partly a way of checking whether I’d been right.
What I expected, and what I got
I expected frameworks. I assumed I’d spend the course learning the big enterprise architecture methods in detail, and come out able to recite their phases.
That isn’t what happened. The course has leaned much more towards leadership and innovation than towards any particular EA framework: how organisations change, how people adopt (or resist) new ways of working, how innovation actually happens inside a business rather than in a keynote. I didn’t see that coming, and it turned out to be the best thing about it.
Because that’s the part of the job that experience teaches worst. The technical decisions I’d mostly worked out. The organisational ones I’d mostly been guessing at. Nearly everything I’ve studied has been directly applicable to my role, often the same week, which is not what I expected from an academic course. It’s no coincidence that so much of this blog is about people rather than technology, from your people are the problem (and also the solution) to the five barriers to digital transformation aren’t technical.
One clarification, since I write about AI here a lot. The MSc isn’t an AI degree. It covers AI as part of the wider question of how technology affects organisations, but the AI focus in my own work is a choice I made, because it’s where the most interesting decisions in my field are right now. A lever, not a crutch grew out of an assignment on exactly that, which came back with a mark of 78. I’m still slightly surprised by how pleased that made me.
Assignments suit me better than exams ever did
Here’s something I’ve never said publicly. I’ve always struggled with exams. A closed-book paper of set questions, answered against the clock, has never shown what I actually know.
A 3,000-word assignment is a different thing entirely. It’s research: you find the evidence, read it properly, weigh it up and build an argument. That’s much closer to how I work every day, and it suits me far better. If exams put you off formal study, it’s worth checking how a course is assessed before ruling it out. Mine has turned out to be the format I’d have chosen.
Learning to write all over again
What I didn’t expect to find hard was the writing.
Twenty years of work emails, design documents and slide decks had trained me to write in a particular way: short, punchy, and full of bullet points. Academic writing wants none of that. It wants continuous argument, every claim supported, with paragraphs that build on one another rather than a list of assertions. My first drafts read like status reports.
The university’s academic skills team made the difference here. They taught me, patiently, how to write academically, and the habits have leaked back into my day job in a good way. (You’ll still find bullet points on this blog. Old habits, and a different audience.)
How it fits around everything else
Honestly: with difficulty.
I’m lucky in ways that matter. I work from home, which gives me back the hours a commute would take. And my family helps. My daughter has just finished her own degree, in physiotherapy, and is living with us while she looks for work; she cooks most nights, which has bought me more study time than any productivity system. Even with all of that, there are weeks when work, family and a deadline all want the same evening, and something has to give.
What makes it workable is being organised. Deadlines are fixed and known months ahead, so the work can be spread out, and the weeks I’ve struggled are the weeks I let it bunch up. If you’re thinking about doing this, the most useful question isn’t whether you’re clever enough. It’s whether you can find the same few hours, reliably, every week, for the whole length of the course.
Would I recommend it?
Yes, with the caveats above. If you’ve spent a long time learning your trade by doing it, studying it formally is a strange and valuable experience. Some of your instincts get confirmed, a few get corrected, and you gain the words and the evidence to explain the rest to people who don’t share them.
And as a recovering sceptic: the formal side of architecture turned out to be far more about people than I’d assumed. That was the thing I’d been missing.