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taking charge of your learning

There is no shortage of individuals who have created entirely different careers compared to where they started:

• Chip Wilson, founder of Lululemon and widely credited with creating the “athleisure” retail category, started his career in an oil company but remained deeply curious about how to develop functional yet stylish sports clothing
• Nisha Katona, founder of Mowgli, an Indian street food chain in the UK, became a restauranteur following a 20-year career as a full-time barrister, in pursuit of her passion for food
• Nicola Elliott, founder of Neom Organics, trained as an aromatherapist and nutritionist after she became concerned about her own well-being in her hectic job as a magazine journalist
• Tara Swart, neuroscientist, top-tier leadership coach and award-winning author, started her career as a medical doctor

These entrepreneurial moves were driven by deep interest in making things better. They did not start off knowing how to design sports clothing or how to run a business, but they remained so curious about these areas that they spent hours learning how to do it well.

Many of the most rewarding jobs today involve doing things that did not even exist when the people doing them were still in school. The prescribed paths are crumbling away. It has never been more necessary and less risky to pursue areas that you have deep interest in to remain relevant in the future of work.

To do so, we must learn how to learn.

What skills do we need? What level do I need to learn that skill to? How urgently do I need to learn this skill? How do I learn best?

Learning requires us to maintain a beginner’s mindset. We do not need to know it all. We only need to distinguish between what we know, and what we do not know.

When you know where things go, how they fit together, and why, then learning can accelerate.

Once we are motivated to learn something new, and have mastered the basics, we can hone our skills through deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice involves deconstructing a method, analysing which parts you want to improve, then building on what works until you are as good as you want to be.

For example, when I was learning to edit videos, I had to pay attention to pace of speaking, the story of a piece of music, the quality of lighting and graphics for the visual components, among others. By filming a short segment, I could prioritise which areas I wanted to improve and deliberately practise them.

Practice can take three forms[1]:

• Education: Learning through structured courses and programmes
• Exposure: Learning with and through others (e.g. coaching, networking)
• Experience: Learning through day-to-day activities and challenges

The nature of the skill, and the level of mastery we seek will influence how much time and energy we devote to these areas.

Let’s examine this further.

As the framework below shows, we can diversify skills in three main directions:

• Apply existing skills in new markets (i.e. areas where there is demand)
• Develop new skills and apply them to existing markets
• Develop new skills and apply them to new markets

New skills in new areas: Education

To learn new skills in new areas, you will most likely need some formal training to understand basic concepts that you can then apply.

In my first years at university, I focused on mainly quantitative techniques to solve defined problems. I then chose to progress to techniques to frame and address more complex problems, where conflicting objectives across multiple stakeholders made it difficult to define the problem. These were mostly qualitative in nature. This led to further research in combining these techniques to create resilience and flexibility.

New skills in existing areas: Exposure

Here, the assumption is that you have foundational skills, but you may want to expand your repertoire. It’s like cross-training, where you deliberately engage in other exercises to get better at your core.

They may seem strange and even silly, but this element of creative flair may also inject fresh motivation to improve existing skills in existing areas. For example, when I wanted to learn how to adapt my writing style to be less academic and more appealing to a wider audience, I took a public speaking course. I began to record myself, which helped me to refine my writing based on my spoken word.

Existing skills in new areas: Experience

When you are just beginning to learn something, you focus on mastering the building blocks. As you improve, you build on what works, and begin to look at what might stop you from meeting your goal.

Applying existing skills in new areas to you may mean that you bring a fresh perspective to those who have been working in an area for some time. In a supportive environment, questioning the way things are done can trigger ideas for improvement.

When I was approached to take on a role in talent management, I didn’t initially think I had the deep expertise as some of my peers who built their careers specifically in this space would have had. However, my existing skills in strategic thinking, analytics and commercial acumen were critical to success. There was a belief that I could learn more technical aspects quickly, in contrast to these skills which were harder to acquire. The most efficient and effective way to apply my existing skills to new areas was through experience.

Learning how to learn

The reality for us all is that due to higher life expectancy, we will also work longer. The pace of technological and social change means that we can expect many ‘new normal’ situations in our lifetimes. Given that many jobs of the future do not yet exist, we must take responsibility for our own learning.

We are likely to learn best and fastest when we are deeply curious about a topic. What matters is to be deliberate about what you are trying to learn, why, and to have a plan of action to build your repertoire.

Developing a range of skills is critical to adapting in the new world of work. This will require a mix of formal training, exposure and experience. To allocate your time and energy appropriately, it helps to be clear on whether you want to enhance existing skills, build new skills, and whether you want to apply them to existing or new areas.

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[1] This is known as the 70:20:10 model of learning, which advocates that in order to learn complex skills, roughly 70% of effort should be allocated to experience, 20% to exposure, and 10% to education.

An uncertain job market

There are times when the job market is thriving. Individuals often have their pick of roles that make use of their strengths and offer opportunities to growth in a variety of companies.

Then there are times when the job market is less lucrative, and choices seem limited. Individuals often feel compelled to take roles that provide short-term cash flow, even if they might not offer opportunities to advance.

Regardless, COVID-19 created a highly uncertain job market. According to the World Economic Forum, if the economic shutdown lingers for many months, or if serious pandemics become a recurring phenomenon, there will be profound, long-term consequences for the reallocation of jobs, workers, and capital across firms and locations.

Two out of every five jobs lost during COVID-19 may not come back.

How can we navigate this less familiar landscape?

Be the go-to for something

Whether it’s a manager reviewing a CV, or you’re introducing yourself at an interview, or someone is reading an article you published, anyone consuming or receiving information from you is looking for a hook. How can he/she help me or my team?

You can make this easy for them by being clear about what you are the go-to person for. What do people usually ask you for help with? What do people recommend you for? When work colleagues introduce you, what do they say? What type of work do you love doing?

This will shape the type of work you choose to do, and with whom. It will also allow you to attract the people you want to your work. Similarly, being clear on what you bring to the table helps you to seek out like-minded people.

For instance, my career history involves designing initiatives to help organisations future-proof their strategy.

People have come to me to help them with design of corporate education programmes in decision making under uncertainty, and the future of work. They recommend me for project management and thought leadership.

I have used this to frame my role as helping leaders to envision ways in which they can leverage their human capital to grow their business in the face of rapid change.

Showcase learning agility

When roles are scarce or fluctuating, employers are less inclined to take risks. They are likely to be on the lookout for specific characteristics, such as a track record at a certain level in a specific sector.

The danger of this approach is that what made someone successful in the past is not a reliable predictor of what will make them successful in future.

Savvy employers seek out those with a track record of being able to learn and deliver quickly, and those with diverse connections in their network.

An example of this is Kabir Seghal, who has been a US Navy Reserve officer, author, and record producer, among other things. In a Harvard Business Review article, he describes how working many jobs left him more fulfilled, and helped him perform better at each job.

For example, his corporate role subsidised record producing and taught him the skills required to succeed in the music business. By exposing his clients to musicians, he was able to differentiate himself and make interesting yet pertinent connections.

Create what excites you

Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times bestselling author and host of the Revisionist History Podcast, was initially unable to get a job in advertising, so launched a career in journalism, harnessing his curiosity in compelling ways.

Similarly, Simon Sinek, a renowned speaker and author, led a marketing consultancy that started to struggle after a few years. In an Entrepreneur interview, he says, “When I was able to stop lying, hiding and faking, and was able say, ‘I’m really good at this, really bad at that, ‘people came from all over [saying], ‘Oh, I could totally help you with that.'”

His first book deal was not the result of building a platform, but spending less than half an hour with an editor, explaining his idea and why it mattered. The editor took a chance on him.

In short, cutting through a noisy job market requires you to be memorable.

You can do this by sharing your intense interest in a topic and how it can positively influence the status quo, making unlikely but valuable connections across different networks and concepts, or shaping a clear narrative on what you are the go-to for.

There is no guarantee that people will remember you, but these are tangible ways to influence how they remember you.

What is the future of work?

• 

If you asked ten different people what they understood by the term “future of work”, you would probably get ten different answers.

Put simply, the future of work is the term used to describe the technological, social and environmental trends that will shape what works looks like and how it gets done.

Technology

Rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), automation, quantum computing, and analytics are reinventing the way humans interact with machines.

Automation will lead to jobs being reconfigured as intelligent machines take on activities traditionally done by humans. For example, a lorry driver in future may not be responsible for driving the lorry, but for coordinating the route of a set of lorries based on weather, traffic and energy efficiency data.

Artificial intelligence may enable us to train machines in some of our skills, and lead to new forms of human-machine interaction.

Sougwen Chung, an artist, has been able to use publicly available footage of New York City as well as images of her drawings to teach a robot her artistic style. This has led her to make art in new ways through human-robot collaboration.

Similarly, Icelandic pianist/composer Ólafur Arnalds continues to experiment with technology to play piano notes faster and use robots to make patterns that are unnatural for human physical instinct and provoke new ideas.

Social

From a social perspective, as life expectancy increases, pension contributions as they existed in the past won’t be enough to support us. Most of us will need to work till later in our lives to fund retirement, and to combat loneliness and depression.

New family structures, including the rise of dual income couples who take extended breaks to develop new skills or interests, or to look after elderly relatives, will also drive new ways of independent and collaborative work.

Environmental

Greater awareness of climate change and youth activism around the issue alongside investor attitude towards sustainable, ethical practices will also influence new forms of collaboration. While unclear, the balance across global, regional and country frameworks to address cyber-security, national security and worker mobility will also influence relative attractiveness of places to live and work.

So what?

Why should the average worker, or to-be worker, be concerned about these developments? First, it is no longer reasonable to assume that careers will progress in linear ways.

A recent McKinsey report found that knowledge-intensive and creative occupations are the largest and fastest growing segments of the freelance economy.

This is driving a shift from being in work, where presenteeism, meeting well-defined performance targets and tenure drive progression and stability, to being at work, where the discipline to regularly and efficiently generate products or services that find a market drive a sense of personal fulfilment.

Even those outside the freelance economy are being encouraged to take an entrepreneurial approach to their career. This is because the traditional organisational hierarchy is being replaced by networked teams, where those with relevant expertise come together to deliver defined projects then disperse.

To raise the chance of being selected for projects over time, individuals must similarly develop a strong reputation in areas that matter most to the organisation in order to progress.

Second, the employee-employer contract is evolving. Employees in future may be inclined to rely less on employers for security, growth and development, and more inclined to see them as partners in driving positive societal change.

The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed that nearly 60 percent of employees are looking to employers to help them navigate information, particularly in areas where there are many credible voices, where misinformation is rife, and where employers can play a role in positive change.

This has evolved at a time when governments and the media have consistently failed to meet expectations. As a result, workers who align themselves to employers who share their values and actively support causes that matter to them individually may have a more fulfilling experience at work.

The third implication for individuals is developing their capacity to renew skills and reinvent themselves over the course of a longer working life. The rapid evolution of technology and the freelance economy mean that the scope of the role that a human may occupy will also change.

By engaging with evolving technology, individuals can play a proactive role in reshaping where and how they can add value to a company. This is in stark contrast to sensationalist headlines about robots taking human jobs.

What can you do today to prepare for the evolving future of work? Here are three suggestions:

Use routines to energise

When we expect that changes will occur throughout the course of our career, we can tune in to the routines we have today that help us to feel a sense of order and control despite uncertainty.

This is not about trying to control situations. It is about understanding the people and things that reliably energise us, helping to sustain us during more difficult times.

Whether these routines involve meditation, exercise, time with friends, pets or travelling, make time for these.

Similarly, reduce time spent on activities or people that drain energy.

Leverage your network

Anticipate disruption by exploring those people in your immediate or second order network who may have valuable information about how your industry or role may be evolving.

Ask questions on how jobs are being reconfigured (e.g. permanent to contract, automation of tasks) , new partnerships or alliances in the industry, salary projections, and lateral movements.

These can provide valuable signals to you on how you can leverage your skills in new ways, or invest in learning more to remain relevant and thrive.

Connect your work to a broader purpose

Historically, many people have taken on jobs to pay the bills. Yet it will be increasingly important to be able to articulate how the activities you undertake connect to a sense of purpose, as a way to help yourself and others understand where and how you can add value.

This does not entail months of self-reflection in solitude but can take the form of micro-reflections.

After every project or interaction, note what worked well for you and where you could have done differently. Notice the environment and the people you were working with and what aspects energised or demotivated you. These provide valuable clues on how you can position yourself to consistently do your best work.