Learn Your Way to Success: How to Customize Your Professional Learning Plan to Accelerate Your Career (BUSINESS BOOKS) - Softcover

Tobin, Daniel R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071782257 ISBN 13: 9780071782258

Verlag: McGraw Hill, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

What did you learn at work today?

“Every employee who wants to succeed in business should read Tobin’s new book.”
―Marshall Goldsmith, million-selling author of the New York Times bestsellers Mojo and What Got You’re Here Won’t get You There

“Nothing less than a survival plan for a rewarding, relevant career. Read it if you are responsible for the careers and performance of others. Read it if you want to propel your own career. . . In any case, read it as part of your own commitment to learning.”
―Edward T. Reilly, President and CEO, American Management Association International

In today’s highly competitive work environment, continuous learning is an absolute necessity―a requirement to keep up with the latest innovations in your field and increase your productivity. Learn Your Way to Success helps you launch your career to new heights by being an “active learner.” It provides invaluable tools for:

• Planning your personal learning agenda
• Applying what you learn in a practical way
• Using online learning resources to “learn what you need to learn”
• Maximizing your learning at conferences or trade shows
• Taking advantage of the unique learning opportunities of working in a team
• Keeping track of what you have learned―and what you want to learn

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel R. Tobin has more than 30 years of experience in the learning and development field. He has founded two corporate universities, served as vice president of design and development at the American Management Association, and delivered keynotes and workshops on five continents.

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LEARN Your Way to SUCCESS

HOW TO CUSTOMIZE YOUR PROFESSIONAL LEARNING PLAN TO ACCELERATE YOUR CAREER

By DANIEL R. TOBIN

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Daniel R. Tobin
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-178225-8

Contents

Introduction: What Did You Learn at Work Today?
1 Learning on the Job: Set Your Personal Learning Agenda
2 Taking Training: How to Get the Maximum Benefit from Training
3 Recognizing Your Limits: Have the Humility to Learn
4 Thinking Inside and Outside the Box: Utilize Critical and Creative 
Thinking
5 Experimenting: Learn from Trial and Error
6 Asking Questions: Be a Smart Dummy
7 Defining Teams by What They Learn
8 Learning on the Web: Benefit from the Generosity of Strangers
9 Learning from Conferences and Trade Shows
10 Building Your Personal Learning Network
Appendix: Your Personal Learning Journal
Bibliography
Index

Excerpt

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 job.

Let's look at how you, working with your manager, can identify your baselinelearning needs.

When I first became a manager, I was sent to a weeklong training workshopfor new managers. In preparation for it, I was given a lengthy questionnairelisting many characteristics and tasks of a manager. For each of the more than100 items, I was asked to score myself on two criteria: how I rated myself oneach item, and how important I felt it was to my job as a manager. I also wasinstructed to give a copy of the questionnaire to my manager, who was also askedto rate me on each item and specify how important she felt the item was for aperson in my job, and then to return the questionnaire to me in a sealedenvelope. During the workshop, participants were asked to open the manager'senvelope and compare their manager's assessment with their own. There were anumber of surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant, that came from this exercise:

• There were some items on which my rating was far above my manager's rating,for example, areas in which I thought I had greater knowledge or skill than mymanager gave me credit for.

• On some items, my manager rated me higher than I did; that is, where shethought I was more capable or knowledgeable than I thought myself to be.

• There were some items that my manager felt were much more important for my jobthan I did.

• There were some items that I felt were much more important for my job than mymanager did.

This exercise led to a lot of discussion in the workshop and even morediscussion with my manager when I returned to my office. It helped me to set mypersonal learning agenda, to set priorities for the skills I needed to develop,and to add some topics to my list that were things I didn't know that I didn'tknow.

Knowledge and Awareness

For each of us, there are things we know and things we don't know. We also havea level of awareness of our knowledge or lack of knowledge (see Table 1-1).

• In Quadrant I are the knowledge and skills that we know and use on a dailybasis.

• In Quadrant II are the knowledge and skills that we use, but that we areunaware of—our hidden assets.

• In Quadrant III are our blind spots—the things that we are unaware of,but that should be included in our learning agenda. This is where we need themost help from others in identifying our needs.

• In Quadrant IV is our presumed learning agenda—the things we know wedon't know and therefore need to learn.

You have areas of knowledge and skill that fall into each of the four quadrants.Becoming aware of the contents of each quadrant can help you set your personallearning agenda. No matter how well you believe you are doing in your job, youneed to be in a continuous learning mode in order to improve your currentperformance and prepare for the next steps in your career.

Using the Knowledge-Awareness Matrix

Let's look at each quadrant of the Knowledge-Awareness Matrix (Table 1-1)and examine how you can use it to identify your specific learning needs.

Quadrant I: I Know What I Know

These are the skills and knowledge of which you are cognizant. "I know how tocreate a spreadsheet program, how to use word processing software, how to writea performance review, how to troubleshoot a broken personal computer, how to usethe company's e-mail system, how to write a marketing brochure, ..."; these arethe skills and knowledge that helped you get your current job. Your brain willalso undoubtedly be full of other knowledge, and you may have other skills thatare unrelated to your present position. Some of this extraneous knowledge andskills may have value in other parts of your life or at other times during yourcareer (or in a trivia contest), but our focus here is on those skills andknowledge that are relevant to your current job.

Use Worksheet 1-1 (Job Related Knowledge and Skills Rating) to list yourcurrent job-related skills and knowledge and to rate yourself on each item thatyou list.

In listing your knowledge and skills, consider all the knowledge and skillattributes that enable you to do your job well. These may include the technicalskills that you use every day to carry out your routine tasks, for example,entering data, using the company's e-mail and other systems, and telephoneskills. But your list also needs to include the less apparent skills that enableyou to work as part of a team, to relate to other staff members, to manage yourtime and your workload, to manage other people if that is part of your jobdescription, to manage the parts of the business for which you are responsible,and so forth.

A good place to start in developing this list is the formal job description foryour position, if one exists. While some companies have gone so far as to createa full competency profile for every job, most job descriptions are relativelysketchy and focus on key skills and knowledge for the position.

After you have rated yourself on each knowledge and skill area, you should alsorate that area in terms of how important you feel it is to success in yourcurrent job. You will undoubtedly have some knowledge and skills on which yourate yourself highly but which have little to do with your work. It is importantthat you recognize all your areas of strength; while some may seem irrelevant inyour current job, they may become more important as you consider your nextposition and the shape of your career path.

You may also find ways of using some of your strengths to improve your jobperformance, even if they aren't part of your formal job description. Forexample, few job descriptions list a sense of humor as a requirement. But manypeople with a good sense of humor—who know when and how to use humorappropriately in their jobs—find that levity is a very effective tool forbuilding morale, easing tense situations, and reducing conflict.

Categories of Competencies.

Whether or not you manage other people, there are three primary categories ofcompetencies that can guide the list of knowledge and skills you create onWorksheet 1-1:

• Knowing and managing yourself

• Knowing and managing others

• Knowing and managing the business

Knowing and Managing Yourself. In order to get your work done well andthrive in your workplace, you need to know and manage yourself, regardless ofwhether you manage others. Knowledge and skills in this category include suchareas as self-awareness; self-confidence; time management; the ability to thinkcritically, analytically, and creatively; having flexibility and resilience; andthe ability to build trust with your coworkers and hold yourself accountable foryour own actions.

You may have come to your current job with some of these skills already inplace, while you may need to develop others. Depending on your present position,some of these competencies will be more important to your success than others;that's why the worksheet asks you to rate both your current knowledge or skilllevel and how crucial a particular area is to your job. In terms of your careerpath and the jobs you may want in the future, the competencies in the categoryof knowing and managing yourself may well be prerequisites for higher-levelpositions: if you cannot manage yourself, it is unlikely that your company willconsider you as a good candidate to manage others.

Knowing and Managing Others. Competencies in this category enable you towork well with other people, whether as an individual contributor or as amanager at any level. Very few people work in total isolation, so you need to beable to work effectively with other people, be they colleagues, managers,customers, or suppliers. Competencies in this category include oral and writtencommunications skills, relationship building, interpersonal skills, and, as amanager, performance management, delegation, and empowering and motivatingemployees.

It is important to recognize that a competency may be required for jobs at manylevels of an organization, but that the nature of that competency may wellchange with the job level. For example, most employees in a company need tolearn presentation skills, but the degree of skill required will vary with thelevel of the employee.

• As an individual contributor, you will need to be able to present your ideasto your manager and peers.

• If you are a sales representative, you will need to be able to makepresentations to your customers.

• If you are a manager, you will need to be able to make presentations to youremployees and also to your managers.

• As a senior manager, you will need to be able to present well to a largergroup of your employees as well as to the company's executives and, perhaps, tothe board of directors.

• As a C-level executive, you will need to be able to make presentations to all-employee meetings, to the board of directors, and perhaps to stockholders andthe press.

So while your level of competence in making presentations may be sufficient atyour current level in your company, you may need to learn more to qualify as acompetent presenter at higher levels.

Knowing and Managing the Business. Competencies at this level againinclude some that are important for even individual contributors (such asknowing how to use company systems, problem-solving and decision-making skills,a results orientation, and the core functional and technical skills required todo your job) and some that are more relevant to managerial positions (managingand leading others, strategic thinking and planning, resource management, and soforth).

Again, start with your job description to identify the competencies in thiscategory. If the description doesn't include a complete list, make a list ofcompetencies and corresponding levels that you believe are necessary to succeedin your job. Once you have completed the list and rated yourself on eachcompetency, specify how important you think every item is for your job.

Once you have completed Worksheet 1-1, it is important to review yourratings with your manager. You can ask your manager to complete the sameworksheet and then compare your ratings with those given, or you can simply askyour manager to go through the worksheet with you and comment on the ratings youhave given yourself. Your manager is your key partner in identifying yourlearning needs.

As in the story above, there will undoubtedly be some surprises when you do thisreview with your manager:

• There may be areas where your rating of your knowledge and skill is higherthan your manager's. If this is the case, you should discuss with him whether(a) he doesn't know or recognize the level of knowledge and skill you possess,or (b) he feels that you need to improve in the area. A lesson to be learnedhere is that sometimes the level that you think is "good enough to get the jobdone" isn't good enough to meet the manager's or the company's standards. In thelatter case, improvement in these knowledge and skill areas should become partof your personal learning agenda.

• There may be areas where the manager has rated you higher than you ratedyourself. If this happens, you need to determine whether (a) this is an areawhere you have not recognized some knowledge or skill that you possess and thatyou should list in Quadrant II ("I don't know what I know") or (b) this is anarea where the manager has presumed that you have greater knowledge or skillthan you know you have. In the latter case, you should put the area on yourpersonal learning agenda so that you can get up to the level that the managerexpects.

(Continues...)

(Continues...)

Excerpted from LEARN Your Way to SUCCESS by DANIEL R. TOBIN. Copyright © 2012 by Daniel R. Tobin. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McGraw Hill
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0071782257
• ISBN 13: 9780071782258
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar