Continued Learning and Development: Working Genius

I'm a person who is always looking to find ways to grow and learn. Working for myself and having to tackle a wide variety of tasks, I needed different skills than when I'm someone's W-2 employee working in a specific position.

In addition, when my manager and I meet to discuss what types of activities I'll participate in in the next year to continue to grow in my role, it's not as easy as picking a course on a specific topic, for example.

How to Go About Determining the Next Training Activity

Let's suppose the bulk of my work is Solutions Architecture. As an experienced person, it's extremely difficult to find a "next level" class to give tips to use to keep growing in that. In fact, it's not always possible to find classes even if we were just beginning some of these activities.

As a side note, most of us with experience doing the work have more experience that the people giving these types of training sessions. Or, did you ever look forward to seeing a class by an "expert" at a conference only to realize you have more experience than that person? In speaking with some of you, a lot of us have had that happen to us.

In any case, to find ways to grow that bring me into a new area of learning and that also help me with my work, I look outside some of the courses, conferences or similar events that I used to attend. You might say I'm looking outside the box but nothing I do to keep growing is far afield when you know my reasoning behind it.

With all that said, I volunteered to be part of the The Table Group 's The Six Types of Working Genius book launch. As part of that, my next activity will be to write a book review, here in this newsletter.

What Does That Have to Do With Anything?

The "Working Genius" activities revolve around learning our own working habits and those of our team members. It's a way to see where your strengths lie and where you might struggle.

Someone is reading this and thinking, "Haven't we done enough of these, already?" Yes, more or less. But I guarantee that I haven't yet worked on the perfect team. As long as we continue to be challenged to find more ways to work together more efficiently and effectively, finding more lenses with which to view the situation can still be useful.

So Far

At this point, I attended the book launch event which started with a presentation of the ideas that I found useful. It ended with a Question-and-Answer session and the audience came up with some thoughtful questions. At less than 1.5 hours, it was an easy way to get started with the topic.

Now, as I read through the book, the format makes the concepts easy to grasp and, even if I end up entirely disagreeing with whatever the outcome of this is, it's still a good exercise to consider different approaches.

That's why what we call the "soft skills" are so useful to think about. There's always more to learn. It's an easy target for more coursework for next year's training plan.

Finally

So, for the next newsletter, you will see the book review. Some of you will find it interesting, others will not, some will think it a good use of my training time, others not so much.

As with a lot of you, though, I do my best to look for new opportunities for growth and learning. Being a difficult task, we just do our best.