Make the right connections when answering the question!

When knowledge and skill acquisition is at a premium in rapidly changing situations, many job seekers think in conventional terms of set qualifications, set training and education programmes, set off- the- job formal activities. Few recognize opportunistic uses of daily experience at home or at work. Few see any difference between knowledge acquisition and learning or indeed the application and transfer of new knowledge or insights to the context and content of their jobs

Here I am interviewing an applicant for an HRD consultant position

Me: Let me ask you about your own development, Leo. Tell me how you have organized this in the last year or so.

Leo: Hmmm…….my last company sent me on a few short courses and I try to attend the odd seminar if I can find the time…..

Me: Tell me about one of the short courses you attended recently and what you learned from it.

Leo: Well, it was a while back and I don’t remember a lot about it……let me see now…..

Time and time again when interviewing job seekers I have been struck by how little people who are in the job seeking market have really thought about their own development. They mainly consider the educational or training qualifications they are working towards or have already obtained. Not only do many see development as conventional formal approaches, including structured programmes, but they see their personal responsibility solely in terms of attending, completing assignments and passing exams.

Not many candidates think about other less formal opportunities for learning. Yet maybe 98% of our working life is spent at work rather than in formal learning situations.

Informal learning situations are not recognized or valued they are simply seen as a matter of everyday life. These situations represent a rich alluvial vein of experience and potential experience to be prospected and mined avidly. Moreover there is often scanty recognition of taking charge of our own learning and development as an active rather than a passive process.

Learning not information gathering

Me: In terms of informal learning activity, Leo, learning you can take personal responsibility for. How and what do you do to bring yourself up to date?

Leo: Well, I read a few trade journals sometimes. I surf the Net obviously on my own subject to see what’s around.

Learning means not just acquiring new knowledge or skill but applying knowledge and skill as new behaviour. Only when this happens can we say that learning has taken place. Much so called learning is just collecting data. When the data is linked to some pre-determined purpose it becomes information.

What I’m looking for in my interview with Leo includes

Recognize-Connect-Try out

Competitive pressures mean that most of us have to concentrate on doing the job and coping with deadlines rather than thinking about what we are learning or could be learning in the process. If we think about learning we see it as keeping up with the task in hand. Learning is coping. Learning is something that just happens intuitively not something that can be explicitly planned, measured and developed.

With very little extra effort we can note and use informal situations as they occur once we have trained ourselves to recognize their learning potential. Examples abound-a web site on the side of a bus to be checked later, an item in the newspaper, a conversation in a bar, a comment at a party. Learning is seeing significance, making connections then trying out an application.

In a nutshell

Taking charge of your own learning and development means

Me: Two questions for you, Leo.

What have you learned from your recent reading or Net surfing, say in the last week or so? And secondly, how have you applied it to your current job? Let’s take the first question……

Article contributed by Mike Saunders, director, Tiro Consulting Services Pte Ltd.

E-mail : perlita@tiro.com.sg