Guest post by Nona Stanciu Dell’Acqua
Three courses in airline fares and ticketing.
I took all three. I learned how fares were constructed, how ticketing worked, and how to navigate a system that, at the time, required a considerable amount of specific knowledge.
Not long afterwards, technology changed the rules. New computerized reservation systems made much of that knowledge unnecessary. What I had learned was overtaken far more quickly than I could have expected.
So, was it a waste of time?
It would be tempting to say no. We like to believe that nothing we learn is ever wasted, that every course, every new skill and every hour spent studying will eventually prove useful.
But I am not sure that is always true.
Over many years, I have taken courses for very different reasons. Some were clearly connected to my professional work: translation, marketing, tourism, digital communication, localization, subtitling, SEO, transcreation, CAT tools, artificial intelligence and other areas. There was an identifiable reason for learning them and, often, an equally identifiable benefit.
Much of what we call lifelong learning works exactly like this: we identify something we need to know and set out to learn it.
But some learning begins differently.
I simply wanted to know.
At one point, curiosity led me to study industrial property and copyright. I had no particular future situation in mind. Later, while working in marketing and translation for a company dealing with a patent application in the United States, I found myself reading documents connected with an objection raised by the US Patent and Trademark Office and communicating with American lawyers.
Something I had studied out of curiosity suddenly had a context.
The knowledge I had acquired helped me understand the documentation more deeply and notice an inconsistency that became relevant to the company’s response. The issue was subsequently resolved and the patent application approved.
I could never have planned that connection when I chose to learn about the subject.
But there is a danger in stories like this. Looking back, we can make every apparently unrelated interest sound like a clever investment.
It wasn’t.
Some things I explored never produced that kind of connection at all.
Computer forensics was one of them.
Out of pure curiosity, I explored a suite designed for digital forensics. It belonged to a world far removed from my professional work, and it never became part of what I did. No new service came from it. No client ever asked me for it. It did not open a new professional path.
I simply found that world fascinating.
And perhaps that is where our definition of useful starts to become less clear.
Professional development is often discussed in terms of outcomes. We learn a skill to improve a service, enter a new field, respond to market demand, work more efficiently or create new opportunities. There is nothing wrong with that. Deliberate, strategic learning has been an important part of my own professional life.
In fact, for anyone working in a profession that continues to change, some degree of anticipation is essential. We watch how markets evolve. We learn new tools. We adapt to new expectations. We try to understand which skills may become more important and which ones may gradually lose their relevance.
Language professionals know this particularly well. The way we work has changed repeatedly, through new technologies, new forms of content, new communication channels and changing client needs. Today, artificial intelligence is accelerating some of those changes and making the question of what to learn next feel even more urgent.
And yet there is a paradox here.
The faster change happens, the more we are encouraged to prepare for the future — but the harder that future becomes to predict.
We can make informed choices. We can follow developments in our fields and decide where to invest our time and attention. But we cannot know exactly which knowledge will matter five years from now, which tool will become indispensable, which skill will be transformed by technology, or which apparently peripheral interest might unexpectedly become relevant.
My airline ticketing courses belonged to a very different technological moment, but the underlying experience feels surprisingly familiar. Knowledge that appears valuable today may lose its practical relevance faster than expected.
At the same time, something we learn without any clear professional purpose may later find a context we could not have anticipated.
But not everything has to fit the plan.
Sometimes we follow an interest before we know what to do with it. Sometimes a connection appears years later. Sometimes technology makes what we have learned obsolete before we have much opportunity to use it.
And sometimes nothing happens at all — at least not in the professional sense.
That distinction matters.
Learning creates opportunities. It does not guarantee outcomes.
A course in industrial property can unexpectedly become relevant in a patent case. Three courses in airline ticketing can lose much of their practical value because technology moves faster than expected. An excursion into computer forensics can remain exactly that: an excursion into an unfamiliar world.
If professional outcome is our only measure of value, the first experience produced a clear return, the second largely lost its practical value, and the third led nowhere.
But perhaps that measure is too narrow.
There are obvious ways in which learning can create professional value: a new service, a new client, greater efficiency, access to a different field. These are tangible outcomes, and they matter.
Other effects are harder to measure. Learning can give us enough understanding to recognize something we would otherwise have missed. It can make an unfamiliar subject less opaque. It can change the questions we ask or make us more aware of how much we do not know. Sometimes it simply gives us a different point from which to look at something else.
None of this means that every course is worthwhile or that every curiosity will eventually reveal a hidden professional purpose. Some knowledge really does become obsolete. Some interests remain interests. Some experiments lead nowhere we can identify.
That possibility does not need to be turned into a success story.
The same is true beyond formal learning.
Travel has been another important part of my life. I have travelled through much of Europe and further afield, including the United States and Japan. Over time, tourism also became part of my professional life: I qualified as a Technical Director of a Travel and Tourism Agency and worked in the sector.
But that is only one way of measuring what those experiences gave me.
Travelling also meant encountering people, languages, cultures and different ways of seeing things. A week spent volunteering at Expo 2015 offered something similar: an intense experience of human interaction, discipline and openness to new perspectives.
Some of that became professionally relevant. Some of it did not. And much of its value cannot be separated quite so neatly.
Not everything fits into a calculation of return on investment.
Perhaps this is one of the difficulties with lifelong learning. The language we use around it often encourages us to look forward: Which skills will we need? What should we learn next? Where is the profession going? What will make us more competitive?
These are necessary questions.
But a professional life, especially a long one, rarely develops as neatly as the plan we might draw for it.
Some choices make sense immediately. Others make sense only in retrospect. Some lead to unexpected opportunities. Others are overtaken by events. And some remain apparently disconnected from everything else we do.
Planning matters. But so does leaving room for what we didn’t plan.
That does not mean collecting courses indiscriminately or treating every passing interest as an investment in a future career. It simply means accepting that we cannot always know in advance which knowledge will connect with something else — or whether it ever will.
And perhaps we do not always need to know.
There is value in learning with a destination in mind. There can also be value in learning because something has caught our attention and we want to understand it better.
This was also true when, later in life, I studied political science and international relations simply because I wanted to understand more, even though I had no expectation that the degree would open a new professional path. Curiosity was reason enough.
Not everything we learn needs to justify itself in advance.
Sometimes the connection appears later. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes what remains is not a new service, a new client or a new professional direction, but a broader understanding of something we did not know before.
A career needs direction. It also needs enough room for discovery.
And what appears to lead nowhere may still change what we notice along the way.
If this guest blog got you thinking, then join us on International Translation Day 2026, where Nona will be speaking about “The curious translator: Why lifelong learning begins with curiosity”.
Register for free with one click at: https://www.proz.com/next/tv/International-Translation-Day-2026#schedule
Nona Stanciu is a freelance translator and linguistic consultant with over four decades of experience working across languages and different business sectors. Her professional journey began with translation and interpreting and later expanded through studies in political science and international relations, as well as continuous training in a variety of fields. Over the years, she has broadened her work beyond translation into areas including localization, transcreation, audiovisual subtitling, marketing and tourism. She works with Romanian/Moldovan, Italian, English and French, and has built her career around an ongoing interest in language, communication and the connections that emerge between different areas of knowledge.
I’m delighted to share my guest post, “What if it doesn’t lead anywhere?”
It grew out of some of the reflections behind my upcoming webinar, The Curious Translator: Why lifelong learning begins with curiosity, but explores a question of its own: what happens when we learn something without knowing where — or whether — it will lead?
Thank you to ProZ.com for the opportunity to share it with the community.