3 Strategies For Lifelong Learning And Adaptability
Many a times we focus on solutions pertaining to the present and invest our times temporarily and quite often ignore the long run, we find then find ourselves lagging in a long never ending race, how do we avoid this?
Undoubtedly, the world is advancing and we’re constantly in the grind of every day-life; however in the times we live in, it is absolutely vital to prioritize and invest in long term learning skills to be adaptable to the changes affecting our industries and businesses.
Here are 3 strategies you can make use of in the long-run:
- Gain a well-rounded skill set
“Its not the age of theory, you need to be up to date, AI is taking over! Freelance jobs are on the rise, people are writing on medium!”
Ever heard of these before? If you do, you know what i’m talking about.
We are living in the age of skills, and i stress on this because there is indeed a huge potential link between life-long learning and the skills that you learn along the way.
If you think about the jobs currently in the market, a lot of them have this Huge Emphasis on skill requirement, they require you to have knowledge of AI (at least at the minimum), be well-versed in different languages and often to possess the skill of customer interaction and engagement.
So we can approach long-term learning through the lens of being proactive about these requirements, to not fall behind many people that are already acquiring these skills.
There are many ways that you can do this, it could be investing a small amount of time every day in learning a skill; perhaps with the current affairs and trends, learn The skills of Artificial Intelligence. You already know the potential that this field has had and what it could have, so why not spend an hour or two learning every day, till you reach a long level of expertise eventually?
And of course, something that could never be forgotten : Language
Since a lot of countries, actually focus on preserving their heritage and culture, there is a huge need to preserve the language of the country, and this perhaps could be due to other factors such as Globalization etc.
So in terms of lifelong learning, we really need to step out of our comfort zone and start picking up different languages, so we can diversify our understanding of different cultures and people.
Through learning the language, you can inspire, influence and integrate your learning for the solutions that people require, and it really diversifies the knowledge that you possess and opens the door to more understanding.
And one of the best ways to do this, is actually making use of dozens of applications that have flooded the market, to learn a different language for example Duolingo or Babbel. Following an instruction guide or a teacher would make it easier for you to navigate the language, instead of cramming up self-study language books with no sense of direction and learning.
2. Implementing the knowledge you acquired
So you’ve been learning all these years, and your focused on long-term learning, but have you actually applied the knowledge acquired?
Part of preserving long-term learning ability, is actually preserving short-term learning ability. This means that without applying the knowledge that you have acquired for the long-term in the short term daily run, in the long term you would actually not find yourself to have benefitted from your knowledge.
“Education without application is just entertainment” as quoted by Tim Sanders (Author and former Yahoo executive)
As the world progresses towards technological innovation, you would find yourself short of contributing to innovative solutions due to the lack of correct implementation of your life-long sought knowledge.
We can also approach this through the aspect of practical professional compared to personal life. Since i’ve been primarily focused on the practical professional side, touching down on the personal side of the coin, it should be noted that life long learning is not limited to the professional side of life.
Lifelong learning should always be implemented for your personal life, if your not focused on improving on the scale of your personal life, forget about your public professional life.
This could be in the form of evaluating the decisions you made, your strengths and weaknesses , your character as a whole based on the knowledge that you’ve acquired, thus the application of personal development knowledge in reality.
Journaling is something that helps in this spectrum, since you constantly observe the changes that happen actively, you can have a better insight of how you perceive others and how others perceive you, this is ideally concerning your personal life.
3. Diversifying the learning environment
We often perceive a single environment to play a role for a single task or purpose and often unfortunately find ourself confined to that single environment.
This is a grave error, when it comes to someone who is concerned about adaptability, because the more that an individual has learnt through different platforms, the better it would be for an individual to adapt to sudden changes as the knowledge is a lot more diversified and applicable in many different situations.
So for example your studying at university, are the university classes, lectures, presentations going to be your only source of learning? absolutely not. You have to go outside the classrooms, learn from online platforms, off-line skilled academies and of course, self-studying as a whole. It is vital to have a combination of different learning platforms so you have different sources of learning. This way, you’d find yourself to be much more resilient and adaptable for life long learning skills.
All in All, lifelong learning as the name insinuates, is a long journey.
So gear yourself up with some of these strategies, develop a strong skill set, implement the knowledge you have acquired and diversify the learning environments for a more productive and beneficial road of learning and adaptability.
