Much has been written recently about significant technological disruptions, such as AI (artificial intelligence), and their impact on the workforce and organization operations. Having a staff team of lifelong learners at the ready will allow organizations to successfully deal with these disruptions.
Lifelong learners have an appetite to explore, are naturally curious, often feel it’s their obligation to learn about new concepts, theories, and tools that could positively impact themselves and their colleagues. Their desire to learn is a great motivator which helps them overcome the anxiety of facing the unknown caused by disruptions.
With lifelong learners as essential members of teams, an organization’s continuous growth is encouraged, enabled and achievable. As organizational leaders, we’re ready to confront challenges, embrace opportunities and adapt to whatever the future brings.
To support lifelong learners and their teams, it is critical that leaders provide consistent, ongoing opportunities for staff development within and outside the organization’s industry. Leaders must discuss and understand their staff’s goals and career objectives. Leaders then better understand 1) how to support their staff to capitalize on that professional self-development zone, and 2) how this passion for learning can be put into practice in the workplace and with members and volunteer leaders. Because we all learn differently, if our staff can apply immediately what they learn, they create stickiness with the new knowledge or skills and better retain that knowledge.
To keep lifelong learners motivated and engaged within their organizations, we can encourage them to become involved within their own professional associations or in other activities related to the profession. That connectedness to the industry, and to the network they build with their peers and colleagues, allows them to create a problem-solving network. Exchanging information, gaining new perspectives, and being exposed to the world of different mindedness really develops these individuals. When organizations make this investment in their talent, the returns to the organization are manifold.
5 Lifelong Learning Tips to Create Ongoing Journey of Staff Growth
Learning needs to be a continuous experience for all staff, ingrained into their job like any other regular responsibility. Done right, this creates more engaged, satisfied, and productive staff members.
- Provide consistent opportunities to improve through learning.
- Make a plan for lifelong learning for teams and individual members of the team that incorporates content, different delivery methods, and formats.
- Make it personal, flexible, and adaptable to each team member’s needs and preferences, and relevant to each employee.
- Make it productive. Learning and then applying new skills and knowledge to their jobs is more effective, less abstract, and eliminates boundaries between learning about a job and doing it.
- Measure progress using data to evaluate how well employees are learning, identify possible improvements in learning, and identify knowledge gaps.
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