After a few years of freelance and startup work, I went back to structured learning at NavGurukul. It was a deliberate choice — real projects teach you to ship, but they don't always teach you why the underlying computer science works the way it does.
The biggest gap it filled was in data structures and systems thinking. I'd been solving performance problems by trial and error; understanding the actual complexity behind a slow query or a bad algorithm choice made debugging faster and my code reviews sharper.
It also reframed how I mentor. When you've had to learn something the hard way, you're better at explaining it simply to someone else who's stuck. That's probably the most useful thing I've carried back into client work and into my role at Online Saathi.