Building a Workplace Self-Education Culture
What I read: Self-Education: The Skill That Will Help You Stay Ahead by Ransom Patterson. Published January 29, 2021.
Shortly after deciding to end my time as a professional dancer in my late 20s, I had to decide on what direction I would take for my future employment. Temporary office work had gotten me through lean times beween dancing and other short-term gigs. So, yet again I put myself out there for temp work.
One of the temporary positions I ended up at was in the real estate division of a major national bank. As I was working there one day, delivery people were placing a large box in the office adjacent to mine. They unboxed and set up what turned out to be a Wang VS series computer, what I at the time referred to as a mini-mainframe although Wang Laboratories tended to avoid the mainframe identifier.
I asked the Vice President of the department what it was and when she described it I asked who was going to run it. She said she had no idea. They had extra end-of-year budget they had to use or lose. They bought the computer knowing they’d eventually need one, but without much forethought or planning. I told her to give me a week.
I read all of the manuals that accompanied the system and practiced on the system itself. A week later I announced to the Vice President that I knew how to run it. She came to the office in which the computer resided and asked me to create a simple word processing document. I did. She asked me to do a few other things she was told the system could accomplish. I did. I then explained some of the ins and outs of the system’s configuration and usage. She turned to me and said “I guess we now know who’s going to be running this system for us.”
That was the beginning of a computer and software career that has served me well over the years. I will forever be grateful to the woman who was willing to give me that chance.
Self-education has been my passion since childhood. I benefitted from formal schooling, but I honestly often felt that my education blossomed and thrived despite my formal schooling not because of it. I admit attending a good school and learning how to read, write, and think about different topics in grades 1-8 likely set me on a better path than many with less opportunity, But after that I mostly went through the motions of high school and the first semesters of college. I got good grades because I read a lot, wrote well, and was a champion test taker (thank you dad for teaching me how to do well on tests).
I documented much of my self-education journey and what I learned along the way in my book, The Art of Self-Education: How to Get a Quality Education for Personal and Professional Success Without Formal Schooling.
That was a long-winded explanation as to why I believe fostering self-education skills is one of the key abilities that will catapult people to better lives overall. That also includes improving job performance and potential career paths. While formal education and training has a place in business and corporate environments, I don’t think anything surpasses the effectiveness of empowering employees to self-educate to learn the information and skills they need to do their job well.
This post is my case for companies to start erring on the side of fostering more self-directed learning in the workplace. I contend this is even more important than any formal training a company might offer. While formal education and training, whether delivered live in a classroom or via webcast or through carefully designed videos, has its place in companies, it’s the employees who can self-educate best who will prove to be the most productive and ultimately improve the company’s bottom line.
I’ll use a hackneyed proverb for which the origin is unknown that sums up my sentiment on this topic. “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.” I’ll modernize the gender here and acknowledge it of course applies to everyone. Having the ability to self-educate can set one apart from coworkers and job candidates. It can most certainly improve the overall performance of an employee in the workplace.
That brings me to the article that inspired this post. Patterson does a nice job of explaining that the ability to self-educate will help people stay ahead, both in life and the workplace.
In this post, I’m going to share my favorite lessons for educating yourself on any subject. We’ll start with a look at why self-education is such a valuable skill. Then, we’ll move to a process you can use to start your own self-education adventures.
Patterson points out that in today’s employment marketplace, credentials are no longer enough to set one apart. Even if one has a college degree, it’s not necessarily enough to secure a good job. If you can figure out how to communicate to hiring managers that you’re self-directed and motivated about acquiring new knowledge and skills, it’s a plus that savvy hiring managers will note.
Media regularly touts the automated and computerized future likely to eliminate many jobs, including entire job categories. That is and will always be the case. The pace of those changes may escalate in the coming years. But existing jobs also end up with expanded necessary knowledge domains. And new jobs get created for which an external or internal candidate has to figure out how to best be qualified to apply for that position.
Most traditional classroom education, and that often includes internal company trainings, is too slow to catch up to the ever-increasing pace of new information and skills necessary to remain current in one’s job. Long-term careers require a constant upskilling if one is to remain competitive within both the company culture itself and the overall employment landscape.
That’s all great, but how do you educate yourself when you need to learn something new. There are many guidelines and techniques that work well and the articles offers a few.
It might sound ridiculously obvious, but first you need to identify what it is you want to learn.
Besides being specific about what you want to learn, you should also determine why you want to learn it. As with building good habits, you shouldn’t decide to learn something just because your friend or mom or some guy on the internet said so.
Rather, you should choose learning goals that are personally meaningful. This could be to help you advance in your career, but it could also be pure curiosity. Regardless, you’re more likely to stick with a learning goal if you have a clear “why” in mind.
Anyone who has investigated learning theories has likely stumbled upon the theory of learning styles. A learning style is ostensibly the specific way in which someone learns best. Once upon a time, auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learning styles were considered universal truths. Recent research appears to negate the idea that we all have a single, primary learning style. Most of us learn well in multiple ways. Managers setting up resources by which employees (and customers) self-educate should remember to offer opportunities to learn using all three styles.
That said, there are so many mechanisms these days by which you can learn: reading; videos, using flashcards, imitating the instructor teaching you, engaging in individual or team learning projects, collaborating with other students and learners, and so many others. The workplace should encourage as many ways to provide these resources as possible.
Company websites can offer a curated list of reading and video sources. Leverage already existing online content when possible rather than recreate such content in-house. Managers can encourage and facilitate their team members to come up with learning projects that will help them learn new things in ways that are also directly pertinent to the needs of their jobs.
Starting with the right learning resources is vital. However, I believe an even more important thing to do for workplace teams is to give them the time to learn new things. Managers should let it be known that they are acknowledging the learning their employees want to undertake on their own and carve out the time in their weekly schedule to do so.
Speaking of acknowledging self-directed learning, when it comes time for performance reviews, managers should encourage their team members to include examples of new knowledge or skills attained in ways outside of any formal training that historically has been the only training officially documented in performance reviews.
Companies should coach their managers on how to best encourage self-education on their teams. By giving managers updated information on the best ways to self-educate, they can best guide team members during their own learning endeavors.
In addition to providing good learning resources, managers should understand as much as possible about how people self-educate effectively. Concepts such as learning in sprints, how to do deliberate practice, spaced repetition to cement information retention, ongoing self-assessments, and other self-learning approaches should be part of a manager’s awareness so they can guide and encourage their team members’ learning activities.
This post is already getting long and I’ll have much more to say about this topic in the future. I hope companies and team managers realize that they will not adequately educate and train their employees by using only formal classroom instruction or training videos.
Ultimately, a company’s employee education superpower will depend on to what extent they can motivate and facilitate their employees undertaking learning on their own. Such learning benefits the employee and the company. But unless a company fully acknowledges that employee self-directed learning is their first and best line of education defense to remain competitive in the marketplace, they will lose ground to those companies that do.
Learning is fun too. One of the great things about a workplace encouraging self-education and enabling the adoption of good self-learning techniques is that it not only benefits the company itself, but it’s offering to their employees a lifelong process by which they can remain well employed while also living a much more interesting life.
But beyond the “practical” reasons for learning new things, I’ll present one additional reason: the pure joy of learning. Learning a new skill can be more exciting than any TV show, more immersive than any video game, and more rewarding than both.
By all means, learn new things to increase your income or even to change careers. But don’t forget to have fun.
If you’re a company thought leader or manager, consider implementing self-education awareness, resources, and skills within your workforce. Your company and its profits will benefit.
You can use this link to access all my writings and social media and ways to support my work.