How do you approach studying for work and new tools

TheFORCE

Just curious about how other people approach studying for tools that they need to use at work. I'm more specifically referring to new tools like SIEM's etc.(No certificates) I have been assigned responsibility to manage 3 different tools all unrelated to each other. Each has like 5-6 pdf guides ranging from 300 to 500 pages for the different modules. One of them is in production and two of them in development so I can't really play too much. Do you guys study in situations like this by allocating 1 hour daily to read the guides or do you let time teach you by using the tools and then use the guides as references? Do you get the guides home and study when you have free time or do you do it only at work?

Some of the vendors have ridiculous business models where they charge your for everything that you ask them so you get yourself stuck in a circle where you trying to avoid asking the vendor for help because company will be charged and between not having enough time to figure it out on your own because you don't have the knowledge or training yet. I'm swapped in managing the projects to the point were I don't have enough time to study or use them enough to train myself for these tools. So what do you guys do?

JoJoCal19

At my last job I was in the same boat. I was thrown some Dell applications where I wasn't even afforded the luxury of having the PDF guides all sitting there for me. The state of the application installations all varied and in different states so I had to find out what version they were in, get the user guides and installation guides for them, and get to know the applications. Luckily I could dedicate 2-4 hours a day to reading up on them and learning. We also had a dev environment for each application so I was able to mess around with them. I would say see if you can set aside 1-2 hours a day to read up on them. If its a hard requirement see if you can get time daily approved to dedicate solely to learning them. If not you'll have to put in some time on your own reading the guides. Also see if you can stand up some dev servers and play around with installing and configuring the tools.