How to Boost your Lifelong Learning Ability?

Rating

How to Boost your Lifelong Learning Ability?

Our world is changing at an ever-increasing pace, and we must learn faster to keep up. But learning is painful for most of us because of our resistance against change and unfamiliarity. How can we boost our learning ability and turn learning into a more enjoyable process?

Lifelong Learning

Lifelong Learning is the ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons. It is important for an individual's competitiveness and employability, but also enhances social inclusion, active citizenship, and personal development.
Andersen (2019) has identified four attributes that belong to "lifelong learners", a discomforting notion for most of us. The four attributes are: aspiration, self-awareness, curiosity, and vulnerability. Interestingly, she also suggests mental tools for each of them to help to boost these attributes and make people better learners.

ASPIRATION
Good learners are inspired to understand and master new skills. However, when confronted with something new, we tend to focus on the negative, such as "it will take more time to finish the first few jobs if I use the new system…", which unconsciously reinforces our lack of aspiration. Therefore, we need to shift the focus if we want to learn something. Research shows that shifting our focus from challenges to benefits helps to increase the aspiration. For example, we can picture ourselves benefiting from a gained skill, such as: If I use the new system to do my jobs, I can build up a CRM system based on the data.

SELF-AWARENESS
Great learners understand what qualities, knowledge and skills they have and what they do not. But most of us usually overrate ourselves in self-assessment and are blind about what we still need to learn. An accurate self-assessment should start from realising our biased or flawed perspective and seeking for greater objectivity, which makes us more open to hearing and acting on different opinions from others.

CURIOSITY
Curiosity keeps people trying and understanding new things. Instead of focusing on and reinforcing the initial disinterest in a new subject, people good at learning ask themselves questions such as Can I do it differently and how?, and act on the answer to such questions. This practice helps them find out at least one thing about the "boring" subject that can spark their curiosity. Besides, keeping curiosity and doing things in another way often contribute to innovation.

VULNERABILITY
Being bad at something makes most of us uncomfortable. Great learners allow themselves to be a vulnerable beginner, which makes them less uncomfortable at learning. We need a balanced mindset at the beginning stage, such as I might be dumb or bad at doing this now as I have never done it. But I will get better and master the skill over time. When people are encouraged to accept failures and learn from them in the early stage of learning, they become more interested in the subject and achieve better outcomes.

The ability to keep learning new knowledge and skills is essential in this rapidly changing world. With Andersen's interesting tips you can boost your learning ability by having more aspiration, self-awareness, curiosity, and vulnerability.

Source: Andersen, Erika. (2019). "Learning to Learn". Harvard Business Review on How to Learn Faster and Better, Winter 2019, 14–17.

		Comments by date▼ Comments by rating Rating
		10 Jaap de Jonge Editor, Netherlands
	The Importance of Lifelong Learning for You Thanks for sharing this interesting article. If the world keeps on changing as fast as it is doing now (and why wouldn't it), that means there is going to be room for only one type of people who will have a job in the future: those who learn fast. I don't mean to scare the hell out of everybody but I just want to make that point very clear. I recognize the 4 attributes of good learners in myself and agree with them from my observations over the years, so that could perhaps be assuring to some people that they are accurate. I think the "mental tools" provided by Anderson are great to help you "keep sharpening the saw" as the late Covey expressed it so eloquently as his 7th habit. So try them out! I hope that, at least in the 12 management disciplines we cover, 12manage will be considered a helpful platform to support lifelong learning. It makes me happy each day that so many people think it is.

		3 Chloe Xu Director, Australia
	Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish @Jaap de Jonge: This article reminds me of the famous slogan "Stay hungry. Stay foolish", mentioned by Steve Jobs in 2005 at the Stanford Commencement. I believe successful people share the same attributes as a good learner.

		3 Chloe Xu Director, Australia
	How to Remain Employable Throughout your Working Life? We are living in a world that what we believe today will prove wrong tomorrow, our current job skills may become useless soon, and even the job we are doing now will disappear in the next 20 years. As a working professional, we might want to ask ourselves a question: How can I remain employable throughout my career life? If our current know-how does not guarantee future employment, what do we need? The answer is the knowledge and skills needed for the future. With free knowledge and expertise everywhere now, our "learnability" determines what we can learn. Chamorro-Premuzic (2018) believes the ability to learn can boost our long-term employability. FACTORS THAT AFFECT OUR LEARNABILITY Information overload. When faced with a surplus of information, we cannot decide what to absorb and what not to, and then we close our door to new knowledge. Besides, we find it is now even harder to stay focused and persist on learning, with frequent distractions from social media, online games, and pop-ups. A bottom-line approach. The current employee evaluation system requires us to reach consistent levels of high performance and discourage mistakes. Companies focus on business results rather than employee development. Employees obsess with results, expecting higher and higher efficiency on what they are doing, which sets barriers for learning and trying new things. STRATEGIES TO OVERCOME THE CHALLENGES Pick the right organisation. Although our learnability relates to our traits such as self-awareness, curiosity, and openness to experience, the environment plays a critical role in shaping our experience and helping us develop new knowledge. Set aside time for learning. Do not wait for our boss to tell us what to learn. Most bosses are too busy to learn themselves, let alone spending time on our learning journey. We need to own our learning process, managing our professional growth and development. Forget our strengths. If we keep doing what we are good at, we could never learn. Develop new strengths by addressing weaknesses takes courage and support from the employer. And even this makes us a relatively worse performer to begin with, our learning ability will improve over time. Learn from others. In this era of abundant free resources, learning need not be formal. Some of the biggest learning opportunities are organic or spontaneous. For example, we can learn from our peers, colleagues, bosses, and mentors. We should never stop learning, no matter what we have achieved. Our future depends on if we can keep learning. Source: Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2018). Take Control of Your Learning at Work. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/07/take-control-of-your-learning-at-work.

		3 Molokanova Professor, Ukraine
	The Importance of Lifelong Learning I fully agree with @Jaap de Jonge, the world will change quickly, and people need to learn just as quickly. However, it should upset our editor, since, according to the observations of scientists, eac...

		2 Elizabeth Korasare CEO, Ghana
	The Importance of Continuous Learning As Brian Tracy once said, "Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field". We have to continuously learn new things to stay relevant in our day. Technology is moving the worl...

		0 Maurice Hogarth Consultant, United Kingdom
	Attitude for Ability Without disagreeing with the points made I would see Aspiration, Self Awareness, Curiosity as more to do with attitude than ability. Learning ability seems more to do with how one structures their lea...

		3 Gloria Avila Student (University), United States
	People are Capable of Learning what they Want to Learn My personal belief is, everyone can learn to move forward within an organization or within his or her own interests. All the person needs is the motivation and the proper tools. One can learn on thei...

		1 ANTONIO MENDOZA LIRA, Mexico
	You Learn More by Teaching than by Studying When I started teaching courses, my greatest concern consisted of knowing the theory, mastering it, knowing it by heart, and neglecting how important it is to put it into practice. This is really wha...

		1 carlos peritus Business Consultant, United Kingdom
	Experiential Learning in Transformations @Gloria Avila: Indeed a preference of an individual for the topic of learning can increase their motivation in achieving his/her goals. However, experiential learning as used in a transformation proc...

		1 Jaap de Jonge Editor, Netherlands
	Experiential Learning and Motivation to Learn @Carlos peritus: Thanks for mentioning experiential learning in this context, interesting... Makes me wonder: Do you mean to suggest that experimental learning (as per Kolb) is possible without the m...