Learn. Evolve. Succeed. What You Need To Do To Win At Work

I wrote a piece on the SEC website last week and thought i'd also share it on LinkedIn. Here's the original article - here.

I recently wrote a piece about getting ‘the fear’ of stagnating in a current role and placing the emphasis on yourself to ensure that you are constantly learning in your work life. It stemmed from my own historical need to constantly be trying new things which, I feel I need to point out, doesn’t just come from the fact that I work in Marketing and so therefore the need is to constantly look for the next ‘big thing’. The idea of constantly learning and developing applies to everyone in any job function in any industry and, ultimately, it’s about your own personal drive.

But lately I’ve been thinking about what I wrote back in January and also about how lucky we all are to be living in the age that we live in when it comes to access to information and the ability to have everything within our fingertips.

Depending on which definition you might believe, I’m at the tail end of being a ‘millennial’ at 35 (although many would contest this I’m sure, but I’ll cling to the most liberal of definitions that sees me scrape in as an 82 baby) and I keep reading about the traits of millennials wanting to learn constantly, to which I agree but actually, I think it’s not a generational thing but more of a desire thing. I’m currently re-learning German and my Mum is helping me given that she is fluent, but she’s also in her 60s and is just as keen to learn some of the more natural elements of the language (she speaks in a dialect that my family originate from called Plattdeutsch) as I am.

My point here is that learning and developing your skills is as important when you are in the formative years as it is when you are at the more senior point in your career. But the onus is on the drive of the individual.

The great news is that it’s a level playing field. When I wanted to learn about podcasting recently I simply Googled it and had a variety of videos and blogs of people demystifying the finer points of packages such as Adobe Audition and Audacity. Within a few videos I was able to start playing around with the software and start my own attempts at creating a podcast. No paying for an expensive training course, no days and days spent away from the office, just a bit of time and some testing and I was away.

We all have the capacity for learning. Skills can be developed away from a classroom and away from universities. You don’t need a degree to be able to demonstrate your value, you just need to have done your research and as more and more millennials go from entrants into the workforce through to middle and senior management, the need to have a piece of paper that gets you that foot in the door will be less and less important. Instead, the ability to demonstrate that you can quickly adapt to your environment, that you are somebody willing to continuously improve, but that you also recognise that the current age of information allows you to do that of your own accord and quickly, will be the ‘game changer’ in terms of making yourself more attractive to a prospective employer.

But there’s a difference between ‘knowledge gained’ and experiential knowledge too. Just watching a few YouTube videos won’t make you an expert in anything. You need to be able to apply that knowledge and to that effect I’ve always told my teams to try and test things out. It’s only with experience that you can be challenged, fully grasp a new skill and then apply it with success. As Carly – our People Director – says “knowledge without skill is folly”.

Maybe the interview questions of the future will be more “what did you do at ‘x’ point in your career, as it says here on your CV?” and more “what was the last new skill you picked up and when did you do that?” because it shows just how committed a person is to self-development. That’s when a hiring manager knows whether they have somebody who can pick up information, from those people who can pick up and then apply to the benefit of a business.

As somebody who has been a hiring manager in the not-to-distant past, from my perspective I can say with my hand on my heart that it’s what I look for more than anything else. Experience and knowledge of the industry, marketing software, etc, is useful of course. But Most of that stuff can be taught. You just need to find people who are willing to learn it but not only willing to learn what they’ve been told to learn, but who have the hunger to do it of their own accord.

So if you’re looking for a new role at the moment ask yourself the question: “What was the last thing I learnt? Why did I want to learn this? And what will be the next thing I learn?”

It will stand you in good stead.