How to train your skills
Where to start and how to develop skills correctly? To answer these questions, you need to figure out how adults learn. Who does not know it, spoiler alert: adults do not learn like children. The science of upbringing and educating children is called pedagogy. The science of development and learning is andragogy. We have been well acquainted with pedagogy since school. Remember how you came to the first grade, and the training began. The teacher was an omniscient authority by default. He knew everything, and the children listened to him. The process of education looked like this: theory — practice — evaluation.
First, we read a textbook or listened to the teacher, then we wrote a test, and then the teacher gave us grades. Thanks to this process, we gained knowledge at school. Then we went to the university, where we were asked to forget them. We spent another 5 years on the process of studying, just like in school. Then the ship of our destiny went into independent life, where we can open a business or find a job. We need to provide for ourselves in order to survive. Knowledge by itself does not help much in this. We need experience. This is the key difference in teaching children and adults.
When you are an adult and there are other records in your apartment (that’s a line from a cheesy 2000s Russian pop song), you already have experience and knowledge. There is already much less motivation to gain new experience and knowledge. There is no time and effort for training, since you have to work to buy food. Moreover, most of adult education is based on the model of pedagogy, which is boring and useless for an adult. For example, a coach comes to the company, gives a lecture, gives exercises and a list of books. Only the coach is no longer an authority for you by default, like a teacher at school.
In such a situation, an adult always asks himself the questions: “Why do I need this?”, “What benefit will I get?” and “Why should I believe this person?”. Motivation to study will increase if a person is explained what he will receive. What new learning experience will help to form or develop the necessary skills to work better. Therefore, to increase competitiveness and develop a career. Experience will help answer all these questions. The coach demonstrates and proves personal experience to justify authority.
Learning should also be built through experience, so that a person understands that he does not have enough of it, and learns by experience. No one wants to hear about negotiation techniques. Everyone wants to get a skill that will start benefiting them tomorrow. This is the only way to connect with basic values, which provides a natural motivation for learning. If a person who has read a lot of books will tell you about the negotiations, but has never asked for a salary increase in his life, then nothing will happen to your skills. In the best case, the training will reach the end “just because it must be done”, but the time will be wasted.
To implement effective learning, the “Flask Cycle” learning model is used. Its author is a specialist in the psychology of adult learning, David Kolb. It consists of 4 stages:
1. Getting a specific experience;
2. Analysis of this experience;
3. Theoretical justification of the acquired knowledge;
4. Testing in practice.
After the fourth stage, the cycle begins again. As you can see, everything starts with experience. This method allows you to teach a person to use his current or new knowledge in practice to form a skill. When the skill is brought to automatism and can be applied in new situations, so the skill is formed. It is important to note that here I am writing about training in a very concise and simple form.
Since I work in the Verno educational unit at red_mad_robot, I understand perfectly well that the learning process is a very large, complex and multifaceted topic both from the position of students and teachers. To make sure, read Sonia Smyslovaya’s articles about designing the educational process for teachers. You can read about corporate education and how to solve business problems with it in our Telegram channel “Do not interfere with people’s work” from Verno.
In this section, I want to draw attention to the fact that practice-oriented training should always be a priority. Today the situation is gradually changing. Companies are increasingly aware of the importance of training employees not “just to check the box”, and schools are thinking about how to introduce more experience and personalize the approach. But while everything is changing, you are responsible for your own learning.
