Learning is essential to ensuring we do not stay stagnant in one place for too long. Continued learning is so beneficial, and an indispensable tool for every career and organisation. Today, continued learning forms a necessary part in acquiring critical thinking skills, and discovering new ways of relating to people, and your organisation.
Changes in your career, personal life, community and your organisation are inevitable. One of the most effective ways of dealing with change is with lifelong learning. However, some professionals may look at the figures being spent in pursuit of development and training, and not see their true significance.
Here, we discuss how continued learning is so beneficial, for you and for your organisation
What is Continued Learning?
Continued learning is your self-motivated persistence in acquiring knowledge and competencies, in order to expand your skill set, and develop future opportunities within your organisation. It forms part of your personal and professional development, in an effort to avoid stagnation, and reach your full potential.
Nowadays, knowledge is now at everyone’s fingertips. Those not making use of this opportunity will remain where they are, and their capabilities will diminish in importance. The benefits should be reason enough to never stop learning. The most successful people in the world understand that they must continuously learn to be successful. For us to live life to the fullest, we must continually look for ways to improve.
1 - Continued Learning Helps you Remain Relevant
Continued learning ensures you remain relevant to your industry, by keeping up to date with trends and adapting your skill set. To function effectively amongst this rapidly changing world of technology, you need to learn new skills to remain valuable. Continued learning will help you adapt to unexpected changes, for example, losing your job and having to depend on new skills to find work. By continuing to learn, you’ll more easily step out of your comfort zone and take on new job opportunities.
Any organisation that wants you to grow and flourish, needs to invest in continued learning. Given the rapid pace of change in the modern business landscape, your workforce needs to continually develop new knowledge and new skills to enable your organization to compete effectively in the marketplace.
Happier workers tend to be more productive and engaged. They may stay longer with your team or organization, not least because they feel that you value them by investing in their development. That reduces your organization’s recruitment, selection and onboarding costs.
2 - Continued Learning Boosts your Profile
When you’re always learning, you’ll keep improving and grow in your career and start to receive recommendations from colleagues and managers. The chances are that you’ll switch jobs multiple times throughout your life and you need to learn new skills to adapt accordingly.
“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and only cease at death”.
Albert Einstein.People who’ve acquired knowledge or skills can pass that information to others. Indeed, Agrawal says, “The only way to mastery is through teaching. One of the best feelings in the world is teaching others what you’ve learned.
As a leader of your organization, you need to make learning a part of your culture. Teach others what you’ve learned. You should become such a great teacher that your company can run itself without you there.
3 - Increases Confidence and Activates your Brain
Learning new things gives us a feeling of accomplishment, which in turn boosts our confidence in our own capabilities. Also, you’ll feel more ready to take on challenges and explore new business ventures. Acquiring new skills will unveil new opportunities and help you find innovative solutions to problems. This could earn you more money.
For individuals, learning helps to broaden horizons and encourage self-development. With their new knowledge, they may be able to identify new opportunities for your organization, or identify more efficient ways of working. L&D activities can expand your people’s list of contacts, including potential customers.
4 - Continued Learning Changes your Perspective
Continuous learning opens your mind and changes your attitude by building on what you already know. The more you learn, the better you’ll get at seeing more sides of the same situation, helping you understand more deeply.
Continuous learning isn’t just about you. Lifelong learning helps develop your leadership skills which then translates into fostering lifelong learning in other individuals, by encouraging them to pursue further education. We know how important it is to ensure staff are trained on WH&S upon induction.
5 - Learning Encourages Commitment
Today, perhaps more than ever, workers are “time poor.” So the potential learner must see the benefit of doing it. Explain what he or she can gain from the learning. Will it give him a chance to take on higher responsibility? Will it make him a stronger candidate for promotion?
If your team members can see that you are committed to their development, the payback will likely be their increased commitment to you and your organisation.
6 - Find a Learning Style that Works for you
We’ve already learned how online learning can cater for all learning styles Learning can take whatever shape or form works best for you. Different people have different styles of learning.
- Visual: This style of learning associates information with images. Visual learners learn best when reading or seeing demonstrations, graphs, flow charts and brain maps.
- Auditory: Auditory learners are people that learn best when information is reinforced through sound. They enjoy lectures and seminars, listening to music while studying and will frequently create songs about information to help them remember.
- Reading/ Writing Learners: Reading/writing learners prefer to learn through written words. Traditional online learning courses bode well to them as the content is usually text-heavy. It can be easy to assume these learners are catered for without much innovation but be sure to account for them when building your content.
- Kinaesthetic: This is the tactile style of learning in which people remember information easier when performing the activity, for example doing laboratory experiments or role playing.
How your Business can Help with Continued Learning?
Businesses need to provide access to learning opportunities, and encouraging continued learning. You can do this by voicing your recognition of others improvements and efforts in learning new skills and provide words of motivation. Staff training is crucial to the success of any organisation; for training to succeed it must be appealing, assessed, and easy to do and manage. It also needs to be consistent.
You could go a step further and implement dedicated times for actively learning new skills, for example on ‘Learning Friday’ employees could have an extra free hour to read business books, listen to webinars or practice new skills. You should also consider inviting speakers from within and outside your organisations to share their knowledge and expertise.
Always have a curious mind. Explore different topics and don’t be afraid to ask for clarity. Be inquisitive, and if your intent is sincere, there will be people who will help and support you in your journey.
Skeptics may see investment in learning purely as a cost, not a benefit, with negligible return on investment (ROI). But a valid counter-argument is, “If you think the costs involved in learning are high, you should examine the extremely high business costs of not learning.”
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Tracking and maintaining workforce compliance is essential for your organisation’s continuing success. We cater for varied compliance requirements such as daily inductions, start-up courses and refresher modules.