Continuous Learning - By ERCI Lecturer Habib Kassim

Continuous learning is a popular buzz phrase. Learning is a continuous process as most of us know that learning is “Life Long”. Each day we learn something from somewhere or someone. Learning is acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, preferences or understanding and may involve synthesizing different types of information. We learn from experience, education, sharing and much of the process involve a conversation with others or ourselves.

What's in it for us? Learn everything or we’re not in the right place. Most of us believe that people perform best when we’re in the right job. Trying to teach someone to do a job they don’t enjoy doesn't work. It makes for an unhappy employee and a poorly done job.

We take control of our happiness. It’s ours, after all. Figure out which job is right for us, and then go about learning how to do it. The more we learn at work, the more valuable we are to our employer and the more likely we are to be promoted.

However the value of leaning is applied what we have learned. Application of information or new knowledge involves experimenting not unlike the developmental process of children. Children play, experiment with the world, learn the rules, or how to break them, and learn to interact.

Experimenting with what we learn and applying new knowledge to gain more experience involves failing. Failing in itself can be a great teacher if we learn from failing. We can learn from others failure and we can help others learn from our own failures.

We have to be curious about what do we wonder about? Do we wish we knew how a certain process works or what might happen if we changed the process? Be curious. Look around and wonder, about anything, and then go find out. Curiosity is one of the foundation blocks of learning, no matter how old we are.

If our supervisor doesn’t recognise the great potential just waiting to leap out of us, draw a picture for him or her. I mean this respectfully, of course. Create our own development plan and discuss it with our supervisor.

Our development plan should include, our specific goals; make them SMART goals, the knowledge and skills to be developed, required activities, resources needed, obstacles to overcome, benefits to the company and expected completion date.

We sometimes forget how much we know. We know it so well that we do it automatically. If we look around, there are probably people coming up behind us for whom it’s not so automatic. Give them a hand. Teach them what we know. It might just be one of the most fulfilling things we ever do.

To survive in society, inventory of knowledge can be our cutting edge. Learn to avoid mistake and to learn from mistakes. To make things efficient and effective, we should adapt to new changes, new environment. Learning creates values and reward. Face reality.