My New L&D Job

There's a question I've been receiving a lot recently:

"How's the new job?"

More often than in my previous job changes. Nearly every interaction is a question on my new job.

In a way, I understand why.

My family, friends & colleagues understand the sacrifice and risk attached to this particular job change. I changed country & department, I am moving 10,000 km from my house. It is a rather expensive project in both dollars and brain power.

So I get why they're worried.

I already introduced before the fact that working in Singapore was my dream. Nonetheless, beyond that, there are reasons why I was keen to move to L&D in particular:

I had to work on my people skills.

Emotional intelligence was something I've had my eyes on for a couple of years. I realised pretty quickly that this was for me an area of improvement.

During my studies, I worked incredibly hard. This meant that I became highly efficient. It also meant that I took no prisoners. I would focus on my goal, ignoring the people that might be along the way. I had an unshakable selfish focus.

What's more, my early experiences of work were entrepreneurial, which led to a very distorted view of how large projects actually came about. I thought I just needed to work harder, and that I could achieve anything - on my own.

I was wrong. By an enormous amount.

All significant projects are an aggregate of actions. These actions are born out of skills, which reside within people. The point of an entreprise is to create an environment that effectively connects and enables these actions.

This was to some extent my vision. I discovered that this wasn't the end of the story.

It's not only about putting skill A with skill B. There are a vast amount of people with skill A, all of them different in their own ways. There was a human element I had annihilated in my understanding of work.

I believe this is due to the new way of working. The impersonal, project-based, Fiverr & Upwork managing projects. You're behind your screen, you take on the project, and you deliver it.

In real life, besides our skills, we have sets of behaviors and personalities that are reflected at work. I learnt about DISC, Belvin and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Personality tests used to understand people, and to make sure they're in the right position tapping into their potential.

In fact, this aspect of the world that I had been missing, had been in place in pioneering companies for a while. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was used by Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates. It opened my eyes to a layer of business I hadn't seen before.

It all started to make a lot of sense.

Now I find myself in an environment where I must be confronted with questions requiring emotional intelligence:

• How do I foster the best environment for learning?
• How do different people learn differently?
• Why do we reach plateaus where we stop developing?

There's a strong focus on people. Yes people, the same people who completed every project ever completed - a pretty important group.

One aspect I particularly like is to understand the relationship between learning and business outcomes. If we don't know about something, we cannot implement it.

We cannot sell it.

We cannot benefit from it.

This creates a very tangible benefit. If my company releases a new product, they need the Sales Team to effectively learn about it, how it's used, its benefits to clients, ways of troubleshooting...

If you get this wrong, your product won't take off.

People won't understand it. They won't remember the benefits to the clients. They won't sell it. They will forgot about it altogether.

This is the challenge and position I really like. The call for myself to learn more about behaviors, personalities and emotional intelligence, and the more tangible results and bottom line I can impact within the business.

The way I see it, there's a very strong correlation between our learning and out businesses.

If you don't learn how to shoot, you cannot score.

But how do you learn how to shoot?

Or rather, how do you learn?

In a world where we're constantly in the need to reinvent ourselves, to adapt to new environments and technologies, to keep developing at pace with our peers, this is a very exciting challenge.