Learn How To Learn

If you want a successful career in the 4th Industrial Revolution

Why You Need A New Approach To Learn

Most people relate learning to education, and that a strong educational background is a precursor to a successful career.

Yet many of the world-changing leaders like Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Travis Kalanick (Uber) are university dropouts.

The explanation is simple — college education only provides the foundation to learn. Learning of crucial career-enhancing skills starts after graduation.

The World Economic Forum: The Future of Jobs 2018 report provides several compelling observations:

• If you start university education now, you will not learn more than 50% of the skills you need to land on a job by the time you graduate.
• About 42% of the current core job skills will shift in 5 years time.
• 3 types of skills are most important for future of work — Agile learning, tech savvy and soft skills (emotional intelligence, leadership).

This is the new norm under the 4th industrial revolution. It’s characterized by frequent and rapid changes in technologies that transform the business model and ways-of-work in many industries.

That’s why you need a new approach to learning, whether you’re still in college, just started your career, or in the middle of a successful career.

The Learning Mindset

The new learning approach starts with a new mindset.

Learning is a continuous endeavor. As long as the world keeps changing, there’s always a need to learn.

Because the world is changing so fast, in many cases, you need to learn on-demand.

For example, you plan to start a graphics design business, you take an online course and spend several months to learn a tool. You may find the tool is outdated or another better, faster, cheaper and easier-to-use tool is available in the market by the time you set up your business.

Learning on-demand means you acquire just enough knowledge and skill to start doing what you need to do, and then grow your expertise while you’re doing the work. That is, you develop your expertise on-the-job. You prepare for changes in your next task (or job), whether it’s the tool, nature or the people involved.

At the same time, you need to learn from every opportunity.

When you are successful, after your celebration, consider what you have done right and what strengths you have that made you successful.

If you failed something, be it interviewing for a job, finishing a task on time, or couldn’t figure out the solution for a problem, don’t forget to find out what skills you are missing and what things you should avoid doing next time.

If you have a good boss, make sure you learn from her what she did that made you tick. If you have a bad boss, you learn what she did that pissed you off. Same applies to your colleagues.

Read news and understand what’s happening in the business world. If a large company go bankrupt, there will be articles analyzing their downfall.

Every successful startup has many supporting factors behind the hero (the founder) — creativity, how customer demands are satisfied, right timing, right environment (including an environment that promotes rapid innovation with less regulation), right partners. Learn about these factors in addition to the brilliant, shiny idea.

In short, you need a growth mindset

• Strong desire to learn
• Embrace challenges
• Persist in the face of setbacks
• See effort as the path to mastery
• Learn from criticism
• Find lessons and inspiration in the success of others

Customized Learning Method

When it comes to learning, not all things are equal.

There are 4 types of learning.

1. Technical knowledge. This is how you become tech-savvy.

You acquire the knowledge through reading or listening to podcasts and TED talks. When you come across some gadget that interests you, try to understand how it works, what it can apply to and how it may evolve in the future.

If your computer gets infected by a virus, don’t just run a tool to clean the virus, learn what you exactly did to catch the virus. And since you have this first-hand experience, learn the different types of malicious software and how they may negatively impact you and your business.

2. General knowledge. This is about the business environment, industry trends, demographic and behavioral changes in the population, as well as geopolitics. The essence is to observe and anticipate how these may influence the industry and your career, from which you figure out what changes you need to make to capitalize from the opportunities and stay on top of the challenges.

To maximize the learning from general topics, you need to take away your emotions and personal opinion.

For example, you may find a politician proposes a totally stupid policy. When you look behind, politicians are often influenced by interest groups or specific segments of voters that put them in power. When you understand the motivation behind, you can anticipate what other policies the politicians may incline to support. That, in turn, tells you how certain industries may benefit from it or are negatively affected.

When a CEO speaks in an annual results press conference, you’d hardly find any negative words from the message. You have to pay attention to what he hasn’t mentioned in order to gauge the full picture of the well being of the company.

Applying critical thinking is the key to learning the intricacies of the business world.

3. Hard skills. These are the fundamentals of what you need to get things done. Examples are:

• Proficiency in a foreign language
• A degree or certificate
• Typing speed
• Machine operation
• Computer programming

This is where classroom training and online courses come in. Before you commit yourself into it, you should assess how likely the skill will change, and in what way.

Using computer programming as an example, you learn the programming language and also the type of application.

Programming languages change every 6–18 months, so be prepared the use the minimum amount of time to apply the coding to finish the project. Don’t bother to learn all the syntax and functions.

Different types of application require a different style of programming. A business application for a bank is different from a game, and Artificial Intelligence is coded differently than Big Data Analytics. This type of knowledge is transferable across programming language and operating system platforms. It’s worth your time to go deeper.

Hard skills requires hard efforts to master. Repetitive practice is important. Prioritize your effort on ones that will be transferable from those that will change frequently.

4. Soft skills. These are how to get things done through (or with) people (including yourself). Examples are:

• Emotional Intelligence
• Communication
• Flexibility
• Leadership
• Motivation
• Patience
• Persuasion
• Problem Solving Abilities
• Teamwork
• Time Management
• Work Ethic

Soft skills are generally accepted to be more difficult to acquire and will take a longer time to master.

The keyword is development. You read, start practicing, learn from mistakes, refine the skill, and then read more and practice more.

You will benefit from having a mentor to help you with soft skills.

This is particularly important for Emotional Intelligence development. If you are weak on self-awareness, how do you start learning to become self-aware? A mentor can help you reflect on your strengths and weaknesses. If you find yourself often feeling frustrated and annoyed, a mentor can observe and help you understand why you feel that way. Through understanding your feeling, you learn how to regulate your emotion.

The Art of Learning

Learning is more than the action to learn.

There are techniques that can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of learning.

Motivation and meaning. If you have a passion for what you’re about to learn and know where you can apply the skill, you will naturally boost your energy.

Find your peak hour to learn. There are different zones in a day that are optimal for different activities. There’ll be certain hours you do well in comprehension and memorization. At some other time, you can be more creative or have a clearer mind to solve complex problems.

Everyone is different. You need to observe and find the right time slot for the right type of learning.

Structured learning. Start with a high-level understanding of a topic and appraise the magnitude and complexity of what is involved.

Break down the topic into categories and bite-size chunks.

Each category should be meaningful in a way that once acquired the knowledge, you can do something with it.

If you are learning to program a robot, the categories can be

• Movement (chunks = forward, backward, turn right, turn left)
• Pick up objects (chunks = grab an object, lift an object, place an object)
• Navigate (chunks = sense an obstacle, decision criteria, execute the “movement”)

With the breakdowns, create a realistic learning plan that takes into account your other activities.

Find synergies so you can integrate learning into your daily routines.

For example, reading about technology and world events in the evening is a good bedtime routine. Spend 30 minutes reading on a soft skill each day and practice it the next day while you’re working in your office.

If you have to study a topic, make sure you block the time, avoid interruptions, so you can focus.

Just enough learning. You need to decide when and where to stop wisely.

We are in the age of information explosion. If you keep researching a topic, you can spend days and months and still get additional information.

Apply the 80–20 rule. If you’ve read 5 articles from the internet about a topic, the 6th and 7th ones don’t offer significantly different insight, that means you probably got 80% of what you need. Unless you need to be an expert, you can stop at this point.

Apply critical thinking on your analysis. If your learning involves reasoning and analysis, you need to test your conclusion. Search for articles that argue for and against your conclusion. The difference in the conclusion is usually the weighting given to the arguments.

An emerging type of high-demand soft skill is pattern recognition and problem sensitivity. Examples of application are fraud detection and data analytics.

This falls under the area of cognitive skills improvement. This requires attention, information organization, and inductive thinking.

You need to be able to sustain your attention to the topic for a period of time, focus your attention to a selective area, or try to attend to various information at the same time.

Almost working like a computer, when you capture the information from your “attention”, you need to organize and categorize the information. Then, you can process the information (generalize, rationalize, compare, cleanse, simplify).

Many people take notes for this type of study. A more effective, but less known, tool is mindmap software. A mindmap tool helps you capture, structure and organize contents in short keyword/sentences with visualization (trees & branches) to help you see the full picture and drill down to specific details as needed. If this is new to you, it’s worthwhile to try one out. There are plenty of freeware in the market (Freemind, MindMup 2 For Google Drive).

Reinforcement and Balance

Reinforcement is not just about remembering what you’ve just learned. You have to make learning a habit.

The best way to learn is you subconsciously and constantly look for insight and lessons whatever and whenever you bump into something.

In the age of the 4th Industrial Revolution, there are just too much information and knowledge at any point in time. New ones keep coming up every day. They may be game-changing, hype or obsolete.

Agile learning, on-demand learning, flexibility, adaptability are all skills necessitated by the nature of the era we’re living in today.

Sustained growth in a career is not determined by any single set of skills. The pivotal factor is how you learn and apply your knowledge and skills in areas that matter.

With this in mind, how much energy you spend on which type of skills is a strategic consideration. The proportion of time spent on different skills is dependent on what stage you’re at in your career journey.

For most career-minded college students, they usually spend 90% of their time on academic studies and 10% having fun. However, school grades are rarely the only factor in getting the first job. Those who start early in developing their soft skills and acquiring general business knowledge will have a huge advantage. Also, being tech-savvy is as important as business knowledge even for financial and accounting jobs.

For young adults who are in the early years of their career, learning should be spread evenly amongst the hard skills required by the job, soft skills and general business/technical knowledge.

As you move into senior roles in your career, soft skills will be a key differentiator for career progression. General business/technical knowledge will be a necessity if the role involves setting strategies or implementing transformations.

If you have a fixed mindset, this can be a horror story.

If you have a growth mindset, this is an exciting and fulfilling journey. Still not convinced? This article 15 Benefits of the Growth Mindset pretty much sums up the benefits.