Learning at work day: Who is in control of your learning?
Who is control of your learning? When and where do you learn?
Learning at Work day provides us all with the opportunity to reflect on what and how we are learning. In this current climate the winners will be those who operate a 'Personal Development' strategy.
Personal Development is about taking control of your own learning and development, using the training and support available from your organisation to help you.
It is about planning and recording learning that takes place at work as well as identifying off-job learning opportunities that fit your development objectives. Personal Development can happen any time, anywhere - the key is to appreciate:
- it is happening; and
- do something with what you are learning
It is not necessarily about taking a degree at Open University - it is just as likely to be about improving the effectiveness of weekly meetings with your team or developing a new procedure to improve efficiency in your department.
Whilst you are in control of your learning and development, you cannot work on your own - it is important to identify those around you who can help you achieve your objectives. What resources are there to draw on at work? Whilst training budgets may be restricted at the moment, we can be creative in exploring other learning opportunities. Can you offer to work on a project that stretches you, are you able to shadow someone who is doing the job you would really like to do? How about asking a senior manager to be your mentor? Could you arrange to spend a day looking around a suppliers business to see how they do things? Do you have a colleague whose opinion you really value – ask them for feedback on your contribution to the team. What about voluntary work or local community liaison? Or simply reflecting on that meeting you've just had with a difficult colleague and identifying how you could have handled it better? Tell us about some of the more interesting learning experiences you've had …
Life is my college Louisa May Alcott
This is a guest post by Margaret Burnside from the Centre for People Development, a CMI approved centre, you can follow her on Twitter
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Comments
It will be interesting to see how the younger generation manage their personal development. I'm old enough to be of the generation that was largely expected to manage our own learning at university but these days everything seems to be spoon fed to students. Will this attitude carry over into the workplace?
I'm in control of my learning. I don't really need to go on courses as such as I can get much of what I need on the web.
While personal development should certainly be the focus in areas of learning throughout organisations - it certainly helps if your personal development is aided by a mentor in the company who 'is not' your manager.
Mentoring is a great way of developing people.
I think part of the problem is people don't understand all of the things that they do/ the company do that helps them to develop. Thus when they are asked about development they say they don't get any when they have worked on projects, been involved in inter department meetings, had new work given to them etc.
Part of this may be down to managers not making it clear this is part of learning and development, formalising this in their development logs - or asking them to do so in their own log, checking for understanding and what they got out of it etc.
Getting people responsible for keeping their own logs (as well as explaining all the things they can record in it) is a great way of making people realise that it doesn't all have to be classroom training.
Mind you, there's nothing wrong with doing an OU course or two!