How can you help adult learners returning to education after a long break?

Supporting adult learners returning to education after a long break involves considering their unique needs and challenges. Offer flexible learning options, such as evening classes, weekend classes, or online courses, to accommodate the diverse schedules of adult learners who may have work and family commitments. Offer counselling services to address the unique challenges adult learners may face, such as time management, stress, or imposter syndrome. Facilitate opportunities for adult learners to connect with their peers. This can include study groups, networking events, and social activities to create a supportive community.

To help this category of learners, it is important to conduct a need assessment. This helps to narrow down to their specific needs while designing their content.

The biggest challenge is most adults do not recognize that they need further education. So giving them a new perspective & challenging their belief system is the 1st crucial step. For example, if an an executive is stuck in his/her career because he/she doesn't have a post graduation degree, the perspective of a big leap in his/her career should be highlighted if he complets his PG. He/she might be in a mental state that "as I do not have a PG degree, I cannot do anything about it now." But as we know, today almost every course is available online/distant mode, it should not stop them from reaching tonthe top of people's career.

Having an ability to assess a learners needs can be greatly boosted by having skills in listening and asking the kinds of questions that both encourage them and help them open up and reflect on their experience and how satisfied they are with it. This requires a lot of heart and warmth and presence to do well. But it guides them to getting to their own answers and even becoming aware of their own needs with more clarity, perspective and even a better sense of priority.

Building the confidence of an adult learner is the critical step that gets overlooked. Inspiring and empowering adults to believe they CAN make a change must occur before any growth really does.

Making a point to share stories and perspective of how people generally can feel left behind by technology and that this is normal even for most younger people… can be a balm to calm their sense of overwhelm around learning new tech. Also cutting it down to smaller pieces and staying heart centered while going step by step through showing them new things is helpful. Generally affirming that “everything… even this… is figure-out-able” has been super helpful.

As adults, we don't have the built in school 'friend' support system we did as children. As a coach or consultant, a large part of your role is to be that support system. Reassuring your clients that they aren't alone in this is important to their success.

I think being aware of “memory resources” such as offering to help them have more efficient way to remember things and a simple yet organized place to get their notes from class into a binder vs. loose papers. Have a page that they put inside binder with all the “where to go” info for finding their to do lists and tools and log in info etc whether they are online or offline is useful. Older generations often feel more comfy knowing their is a hard copy place to reorient themselves and avoid a “memory embarrassment moment.”

Their is a way to hold space that allows people to feel into what matters to them, the big stuff, the stuff that matters most to them. Giving them a chance to reflect on these things helps them strip away the “good ideas” and lesser “shoulds” which are distractor factors which can limit their ability to feel what really puts the jam in their jellyroll of life. The practice of doing this with them gives them skills and competency in the art of “staying motivated” which is as important as “getting motivated”.

You can’t really tell a person who they are or what they should do, but you can give them tools to find their own answers, which is far more empowering also. Empowering vs. Enabling is the key. Help them where they need it and give them the best means to do the work to own what they know and make it theirs.