CHAPTER 1

Learning on the Job: Set Your Personal Learning Agenda

For many years, a great many companies could promise a new employee lifelongemployment and a predictable career path. Today, very few, if any, companies canmake that promise. Whether you plan to stay with your current employer or seekopportunities elsewhere, you cannot rely on your company to teach you everythingyou need to know or to create a career path for you—you must takeresponsibility for your own learning, your performance on the job, and theshaping of your career.

Even if your company has a formal training department and offers a catalog fullof courses for employees, no one knows better than you what you need to learnand how it can be applied to your job to make a positive difference in yourperformance. While many companies have promised their employees one week or moreof training per year, the reality is that when times get tough, the educationbudget is one of the first items to hit the chopping block. Even if you get thepromised week of training each year, no matter how good it may be, it will notbe sufficient to ensure your improved job performance and new careeropportunities in your future with the company.

So you must take responsibility for your learning and for building your owncareer path. You must be in a continuous learning mode: learning every month,every week, every day. Without continuous learning, you may well find your joband your career at a dead end. In this chapter, you will learn how to identifyyour learning needs and set your personal learning agenda.

All Learning Is Self-Directed

When you go to a training program, read a book or article, or take ininformation from others in any form, someone has created the content based onwhat he believes you need to know. Sometimes he is right on the mark, and youfind that all the information is relevant to you and serves your purpose. Butmore often, not everything in the program will feel pertinent to your job oryour situation, so you need to pick and choose the relevant content within thetopics and focus on it. In short, you need to direct your own learning.

Let's start with a simple model—the Four Stages of Learning—to seehow this works.

Stage 1 of the model is data. Like most people, you probably find yourselfinundated with data: every book or article you read; every e-mail, instantmessage, and tweet you receive. In fact, everything you take in through yoursenses is data, and you may often feel that you are drowning in it. Managementguru Peter Drucker has said that when you take data and give it relevance andpurpose, you get information; that is Stage 2 of the learning model. Whensomeone creates a training program, writes a book or article, or teaches yousomething, she tries to filter all the data related to the topic and distillwhat she believes will be relevant and purposeful for you and other learners.But that person can never really know exactly what is needed by every individualwho takes the course or reads what she is writing, so you have to do a greatdeal of filtering on your own. That is why you may be directed by your managerto take a course, but you must self-direct your own learning by focusing on thecontent that is most relevant and most purposeful to you.

When you take what you have learned and use it in your job, you are creatingknowledge (Stage 3 of the model). You cannot say that you really know somethinguntil you have used it. For example, when you were growing up, you watched yourparents and others drive a car. When you reached a certain age, you enrolled ina driver's education program and sat through classes in which an instructor toldyou what you needed to know to become a good driver. You may have used a drivingsimulator, where you had a steering wheel and foot pedals, and watched a videoof roadways so that you could develop your skills in a safe environment. But youcouldn't say that you knew how to drive until you got behind the wheel of a realcar and practiced. Research has shown that if you do not quickly start to usewhat you have learned, whatever the source, you will rapidly lose any knowledgeor skill you have acquired.

Stage 4 of the model is wisdom. Wisdom cannot be taught, but it can be developedthrough dialogue, demonstration, experience, intuition, and experimentation. Asyou gain experience in using your knowledge and skills, you may think of newways to apply your learning and experience, and you may experiment to see whathappens if you change one or more parameters. When you were learning to drive,you may have been taught what to do if your car hit an ice patch and startedskidding sideways. If you live in an icy climate, you will gain experience inhandling skids and build a sense of how much to correct the steering when yourcar is sliding, how much to use the antilock brake system, when to accelerate,and so forth. This is all wisdom built on experience, intuition, andexperimentation.

The purpose of this book is to help you identify your learning needs, both foryour current job and for the future, to recognize the many opportunities youhave to learn as part of your everyday work, and to provide a guide to help youutilize those learning opportunities on a daily basis. In this first chapter, wefocus on setting your personal learning agenda.

Your Manager: Your Partner in Learning

While you must take primary responsibility for your own learning, your manageris your most important partner in identifying your learning needs and helpingyou to find resources to fill them. How can your manager help in your journey?

• Your manager can help identify what you need to learn in order to improve yourcurrent job performance.

• Your manager can act as your teacher or coach for some of your learning needsand help you identify other resources.

• Your manager can guide you as you apply what you have learned to your job.

• Your manager can act as a guide to a career path within the company and tellyou what you need to learn in order to prepare for it.

• Your manager can approve your application to take internal and externaltraining programs.

• Your manager can give you developmental assignments that expand your role inyour current job or prepare you for your next...