2.9 Career Connections

COVID changed the way we do work and continues to influence the way we learn, whether in an academic or employment settings. Professionals today need to regularly redevelop their skills and acquire new skills to keep current with what our new job landscape looks like. Your ability to adapt to these rapid fire changes will influence your success in the workplace and that includes your ability to learn.

Developing your self-directed learning skills will help you develop your novel and adaptive thinking skills, and implement solutions to solve complex problems.

Common Job Interview Questions

• Tell me about a time when you had to learn something new in a short period of time. What was the situation? What did you do? How did it turn out?
• You have to teach your team at work how to program their voicemail on the new phone system. How would you go about approaching this task? What steps would you take and how would you know if you were successful?

Developing Your Self-Reflective Practice

There is value in developing your self-reflective practice. Some companies pay thousands of dollars to have their employees take part in these types of assessments to help raise awareness and develop a common language to communicate with each other so things get done.

Scenario #1 – The Workplace

Imagine you are a store manager and you prefer to communicate by email with your shift supervisor Hussein every Monday to let him know what needs to be accomplished that week. Every week you notice things are still not done and your emails become longer and you become more frustrated with his performance.

Which one would happen next if you know about how people may learn things?

1. You can start to keep track of what Hussein is not doing, write more detailed emails and then hold him accountable by writing a poor performance review, and possibly fire him and start the process of finding someone to replace him.
2. Hussein gets frustrated with your long emails and quits and you need to then take over for him while you find someone to replace him.
3. You can recognize that that Hussein may not learn well by reading emails. Instead, you schedule a virtual meeting each week where you discuss the tasks that need to get done, you ask Hussein to write the list himself and you discuss any questions or concerns Hussein has so you can help work through any obstacles, revise the list of things to be done or identify ways to delegate or postpone some of the tasks.

Future of Learning and Development in the Workplace

Read the article below and answer the questions that follow:

2023 Workplace Learning Report: Building the Agile Future

1. According to the article, what role with learning and development have in the workplace now and in the future?
2. In what ways do you agree or disagree with what the article says?
3. Do you consider self-directed learning a strength or area that you could improve?  (Provide some examples to support your opinion).