The importance of learning to learn and how to learn to learn?
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Sometimes, Parents and students alike ask me questions like which Branch or specialization to opt for higher education or which college to go to. Sure, a good branch of specialization and a great college certainly helps. Can a good college or great specialization compensate for other more important skills? I doubt. Based on my many years of experience, I started feeling among other qualities and soft skills like, confidence, empathy, emotional intelligence and other characters like Courage and honesty would certainly help.
As for a cognitive skills are concerned, Maths and verbal skills are very important to all. As far as Maths is concerned it would be a challenge for some. But, the most important skill at least in the knowledge industry is concerned, in my opinion and experience, are (a) Ability to write well (b) Ability to comprehend written Texts (c) ability to listen and (d) ability to express well counts more than even subject matter. The reason why these skills are important perhaps is because, these skills are the foundations on which a person's thinking and articulation skills are developed. If a person cannot speak a few sentences such that others can understand or write a page of an idea in a simple form so that others can understand, what is the use of education? For even if someone has not done well in School of college level, these skills would help them acquire the necessary skills if one can read and comprehend and listen and pay attention. To express themselves, if they can speak well, this can get people great positions. At the end of the day, most knowledge workers are doing their day job using these four skills always. This is the foundation of everything that one has to do in office.
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Unfortunately, our systems are not giving enough focused training during educational process in schools and colleges. When we study language, certain exercises are supposed to help us develop these skills automatically. The subjects that we study in schools and colleges quickly become obsolete in real world. ( Please note that I am not undermining the importance of a great school education or learning a subject well in school or college. They may be important. That is in other words, most tend to assume that if they discontinue from Schools and colleges like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, they can instantly become great. These people fail to appreciate the fact that these are exceptional outliers and also had tremendous ability to continue to learn the subject, because they excelled in reading, writing, listening and speaking)
So therefore next time, when a young person or a parent approach you asking for a suggestion on school or college or a course, please advice them to strengthen their basics in reading, comprehending, writing, listening and expressing well. By the way, all these also lead to one self learning and it is also about effort and focus in a chosen area. In other words, depth matters and practice matters too. But to gain best out of any learning process, one needs to have these basic straight. That is precisely why some people who did fine arts or literature excel much better than some Engineers and even become their CEOs. The important skills are not given importance.
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And unfortunately, after people leave the college and go to job market, they never realize that they lack these skills and they do not attempt to learn these important skills and feel that they have already mastery in these basics. That is also wrong. These skills require very high focus and conscious development and effort. It is never too late to learn the important skills. Hope, you agree!