Who’s in charge of our learning path?

Building a career requires constant learning — either by daily practice, observation, discussions with colleages, books, or even training. Someone’s professional path is no longer static, but directly linked to a person’s learning path.

Training courses provide us theoretical/practical knowledge and with certifications that can unlock access for promotions or career shifts. Participating in debates and webinars (whether they’re hosted by colleages of yours or not) provide you access to new perspetives on how to do things in your field of expertise — and also important networking opportunities.

Our world is fast paced. To accomodate and stop learning is to stop evolving in our careers, reaching a point where we’re no longer bringing a fresh problem-solving attitude to our workplace (and everyone knows what happens to comapnies when they stale).

If both parts — us and our workplaces — have to gain by our learning, who should be in charge of it, then?

Organizational learning: A missing piece of the puzzle

In some countries (Portugal is an example of this), work-related legislation forces all employers to dedicate a number of hours to employees’ training opportunities.

Although this specific legislation helps employees in their learning path, it is not nearly enough. Nowadays, dealing with talent acquisition and retention also means to have concerns regarding how people will grow within the company — and this involves having a learning and career path prepared. Learning opportunities are of little value if there’s no intention behind them.

Employers should be asking themselves these questions:

• Are we providing training or learning opportunities for our people?
• Why are we providing these specific training sessions? What are our goals with this?
• Do our employees see value in these learning opportunities?

A lot of employes will argue that training sessions involve serious costs, and this investment will be lost in case the employee decides to leave the company. However, without any structured learning or growth opportunity, any company is at risk of losing self-driven individuals.

What can companies do to create learning opportunities?

• Listen to the teams: understand what skills they need the most to do their job, and which ones can be improved;
• Open the doors of growth: prepare a plan for career development inside the own company — including performance evaluations, clear goals, and promotions. This will help your team to understand you value their contribution, and to have a clear objective to work towards to.
• Diversify learning strategies: not all learning opportunities come from structured and theoretical courses. Promoting team and inter-team discussions to approach certain topics, organizing team building activities, and welcoming new ideas on old procedures or products (through hackatons, for example) will create learning opportunities for your employees.

Learning is also a personal responsability

We are ultimately in charge of our own learning opportunities. We have training tools at our disposal, most of them for free (online courses at FutureLearn or Coursera are good examples), and most of us already use social networks that allow us to reach out to other colleagues (such as LinkedIn).

This involves, however, being open-minded about taking in new perspectives. We are not always ready to change our ideas nor our ways — sometimes, we’re still figuring out what to do with our lives, or dealing with personal issues that make up most of our time.

Creating learning opportunities involve, first and foremost, understanding why we want learn something, what exactly we want to learn, and how we can do this. Clearly this is a complex process that can take its time.

Everyone should be asking themselves these questions:

• Am I ready to take another step into a learning opportunity: we need to understand if we have the time and mental availability to incorporate a learning process.
• Why do I want to learn new things or connect with new people: this is, in my opinion, the hardest topic here, as it involves actually reflecting on our career as a whole (“what am I doing with my professional life? Is this what I want to do? If it isn’t, what do I want to do after all?”). I’m not going to lie: this can be very stressful. If you can, try psychotherapy or counselling. Networking with other professionals on LinkedIn and asking them for some quick advice can also be helpful. Nevertheless, there a lot of things we can learn by ourselves just because we feel like it — for example, I recently started learning Dutch, just because I enjoy the language and wanted to be able to speak it. Why not?
• What exactly do I want to learn: this stems directly from the previous question. If you wish to be promoted and know you need a certain skill, maybe this question is already answered by itself. But what if it’s a little trickier? I’ll give you my own example: I was a clinical psychologist and a researcher, and I wanted to started working in Human Resources — so there was a lot out there that I needed to learn. I wrote a list of skills that I needed to improve, and focused on that.
• How can I learn: once you have the why and the what figured out, it’s time to start exploring how you’ll all of that into practice. You can use free online courses or free applications, or research into new degrees (if you’re interested in a more in-depth approach). But learning is not only formal education: connect with professionals from your (current or desired) area of expertise on LinkedIn, and ask for ten minutes of their time on a Zoom call! Get to know them, understand what they do and their path, and ask them a few questions that can help you direct your own path. Networking is, nowadays, one of the most important aspects of career growth. You can also learn new perspectives and network with other people by signing up to free webinars about a topic that interests you!

As individuals, we are in charge of our own learning curves, and we have the responsibility to do so — for our career and personal growth. But employers also have a very important role to play here: individuals with more learning opportunities and career growth plans within an organization will be more motivated and engaged with the company, and this will save employes money and time in the long run.