Learning is the new knowing: staying relevant in the age of commodified knowledge

In an article for Forbes called “The death of the knowledge worker and the rise of the learning worker,” Jacob Morgan argued that knowledge has become commodified in the information age, and as a result, the more valuable skill is the ability to “learn new things and apply those learnings to various scenarios and environments.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Knowledge is commodified because it is easy to capture, classify and share. Additionally, the world is changing fast enough that the knowledge we possess has a shorter half-life of usefulness.

With disruptive evolution becoming the norm, how can we be expected to remain productive if we cannot learn?

So, what do we do if we accept the need to evolve into learning workers?

Here are a few implications for workers and the organizations that depend on them.

Get serious about meta-learning

Command over how to learn new skills is the most transferrable skill you can possess.

We don’t have much of a framework for teaching people how to learn. It’s assumed everyone knows how.

The thinking goes, “Why wouldn’t we know how to learn? We’ve been doing it since birth!”

It’s not that easy. The formal education systems that taught us through adulthood did so in the most logical form to support the institution of education—not the same format we might use to teach ourselves.

With only the habits that come from formal schooling, our people don’t have much in the way of meta-learning skills (i.e. skills for learning how to learn.)

Meta-learning has been ignored for a long time, often brushed aside as a given.

But in much the same way a yoga class “teaches” you to breathe, you would be amazed how much better you can get at something you take for granted when you take the time to focus and learn. Command over how to learn new skills is the most transferrable skill you can possess.

Provide the resources to learn

The skill to learn doesn’t help you much without the resources to learn from. Organizations working with proprietary skills or innovators working around a new project need to curate their training materials to develop their people.

Sometimes it’s not practical to develop your own elaborate training material. That doesn’t mean that you can’t find and provide it.

Give your people enough resources to where learning isn’t frustrating. It’s hard enough to learn a new skill—it’s overwhelming when you have to fight to get the right material.

Resources that help in learning don’t have to be pretty, they just have to support the needed skills.

Be prepared to pivot fast

Learning something new is an investment. Like any investment, you need to resist the urge to double down when it isn’t paying off.

One of the most valuable meta-learning skills is knowing where to invest more time, and where to try something different. Developing that measure of what is worth our precious time doesn’t come naturally.

Our optimism bias would have us believe that everything is valuable and none of our skills will lose value. Unfortunately, that isn’t true. Much as writers have to be reminded to take the leap and “kill their darlings” to advance plot, you too must remember to refocus on a new skill to advance your career.

So when the time has come to devote to something else, don’t hesitate.                 

But, you also can’t leap too quickly. Sometimes the new thing isn’t worth the effort. This delicate balancing act is guided by understanding diminishing returns and adapting to them.

Use the crystal ball to find the next thing

Predicting the future is hard. But if you can think like a futurist and learn skills before you need them, this whole process is much easier.

You can approximate future-sight with knowledge of your organization and the market. To do so, find all the potential changes that can be identified near the market or the organization. Then try to think of what skills will adapt you to handle them.

Ask, who will profit most from this change? Who will be best positioned to take advantage of the new normal?

You don’t have to catch all the trends, but you if have a general idea, you will be doing better than most.

Conclusion: Adapt Together

There is much that can be done to foster a learning worker mentality. Start by understanding why it is important, and then build the framework of skills that supports continual learning.

We all want people to grow, but we cannot expect them to do so without support.

Just as knowledge workers once had to step out of the industrial age into the information age to find a place, our knowledge workers will adapt as well. Now it’s up to all of us to figure out how we can ease that transition as much as possible.