How Lifelong Learning Can Advance Your Career and Life in The New Economy?
For years, you had clarity about your job role. You were smart to deal with your career relying on your work performance. But organizations now are compelled to change because of technological disruptions and varying economics. For businesses, dealing with these shifts are vital to their survival. They have to adapt quickly with the speed of change.
That single degree you earned in your teens or a career you picked in your 20s will not be permanent.
Explosion of knowledge is so phenomenal that expectations of customers, investors and partners are highly dynamic and innovative. These developments are urging individuals to master new skills, then pick up further and later keep learning throughout their lives.
Employees are receiving more pressure around their future career direction, and to adapt to these changing conditions more are more workers are feeling disengaged from traditional learning and careers. These employees understand that the half-life of knowledge is becoming shorter, and they have to adapt new skills quickly.
Let’s discuss what went wrong or was it just that we forgot to improve ourselves because we got too comfortable with the cushy jobs and the monthly paychecks
What Is Changing?
From an early age, we are all advised, that learning is all about academic education that you pick up from schools, colleges and institutions. However, that is merely one type of learning. One has to pursue further opportunities to learn a variety of skills throughout one’s life.
Career development should be considered as a lifelong process, occasionally (or predominantly) a unique process for each individual. To manage this lifelong process, one has to learn how to achieve lifelong learning along with work, family life and leisure to advance towards a constantly unfolding and uncertain future.
But now your survival depends on how you pick up new knowledge, how you fit learning into everyday habits, and how you plan a unique career avenue for yourself.
Importance of Lifelong Learning
It is not just for being employable, but lifelong learning should improve our quality of life. Lifelong learning can enhance our understanding of the world around us and bring us better opportunities while enabling us to outsource the least favorite jobs.
Rapidly changing market conditions require the ability to adapt new environment faster -before your job is overshadowed by automation and robotics. More and more people of all ages are scaling up their hobbies and passions to achieve some business/economic returns.
Doing what you love, outside of your working hours, exploring transferrable skills, and implementing those to some business idea — is a brilliant way to join the workforce of tomorrow.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn
— Alvin Toffler
Average is Over — And The World is Not the Same Anymore
If your skills do not complement the future, then you need to focus on that imbalance, else soon you are going to fall on the unfavorable position of the economic divide. We are living in the age of machine intelligence where all information is available at a swipe or a touch; or we can ask Siri, Google, Cortana.
We should not struggle to win a battle against the machine, we are sure going to lose. Soon many people will face this harsh awakening that they were average and that’s why machines took over. Machines will get better, cheaper and faster- beating an average employee.
Essential nature of new economy will keep widening the gap between rich and poor — means dealing with one large and bitter truth: —
If you’re not at the top, you’re at the bottom
New Way of Learning — And The Radical Future of Work
Curiosity, creativity and a passion for lifelong learning will create a radical future of work. University degrees will be important but new learning methods with engaging content and virtual rooms discussing real-world problems will give rise to independent workers.
The Future of work does not welcome full-time permanent employment but cherish part-time independent contracting workers. This could mean that non-standard work will become the norm and your personalized learning and unique career path will decide your future success.
Many of the roles, needed skills and business titles of the future are still unknown to us. Talent is no longer same as it used to be five years before.
To accomplish any form of learning, recognize your areas of strength and weakness, identify what environment suits your learning and what distracts you. Once you are done with this exercise, you will be able to decide your learning methods. Formal part-time instructor led courses in your hometown or long-term specialized course delivered on-line through MOOC (Massive Open On-line Course).
The rapid growth of on-line education means that employees can re-skill themselves faster than ever before, and mostly for free. MOOC (massive open on-line course) is an economical alternative to formal education, can be accessed by anybody anywhere as long as they have an internet connection and a computer.
In times of change, learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists
— Eric Hoffer
You need to understand the changing contours of traditional career, recognize the weakening relationship between people and their organizations.
Carefully examine your career development strategy based on lifelong learning and skill mismatch. Rising expectations towards learning to work and learning from work is creating new work order where you should judge yourself by your learning competence
How Lifelong Learning Will Re-invent Your Life?
Lifelong learning makes us less risk averse and more adaptable to change when it happens.
It challenges our preconceived notions and build our self-esteem. With your life-long learning mindset, you will be able to adapt to a changing employment landscape while at the same time it will keep you mentally refresh and stimulating.
Mind is a muscle. The longer we keep learning, the longer we will have the mental agility to learn new skills.
Learning how to learn is more important than ever. Learning is not a complicated concept. But, how one learns, is critical here -because everyone is unique and learns in their own way. Dedicate yourself to trying and learning new ideas, tasks and skills. You don’t need to be aware of everything all the time but learning new skills faster and better — that itself is a tough skill to master.
Approaching any new material with a goal of learning it, mastering it on your own, can give you a unique path to create your influence on subject.
There are many subjects that are difficult to understand, take pride in yourself. Do not listen to people who says you can’t do it.
Make learning a little fun and throw away all present prejudices about what you can accomplish and what you can’t. Once you learn how to become a better learner and a life-long learner — your life will change in a progressive way if you maintain your curiosity and intellectual humility.
