Curiosity Helps You Skin the Career Cat (Part 1)
| 23 | May |
| 2013 |
In a
recent post, I discussed what you need to move your career forward by
assessing, and focusing on, your strengths and weaknesses. Doing so
identifies the specific hard and soft skill gaps you need to address. How do you
do this? Get curious!
What resources are available in this Learning
Curiosity stage of the continuous
learning circle? You’re giving yourself permission to investigate these gaps
on your own and with the advice of close friends, allies and mentors. You're
looking for online and offline content, courses to consider and inspiring
examples to emulate. Altogether, these will form the bedrock guide as you go
deeper into gaining control of your career.
By exploring these resources, you’re experimenting with different
perspectives and ideas about how you can get better and who can help you do
that. At this stage, you don’t need a master plan for self-improvement; you
need to go forth and conquer your old assumptions.Not a Lightning Bolt – Trial and Error
We know from Peter Sims and University of Chicago behavioral economist David Galenson that the successes of our greatest innovators, from Jeff Bezos to the folks at Pixar and Google, don’t arrive in lightning bolt insights or from complex, long-term master plans. They are more likely to arrive from trying, learning and moving on. Experimental, iterative, trial-and-error approaches give you real-time feedback and an opportunity to redirect. So if a particular direction isn’t working, try another. But stay curious. And, be sure to talk to people who really know the situation – meaning, you and those who know you best.
Learning opportunities are all around us these days. There is hardly a topic without more answers than questions on the Internet. Wikipedia, Facebook community pages, LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter, Google, forums, blogs, chats and webinars – and many other educational and social media opportunities emerging – offer resources and ideas for developing your community. Although the Internet has replaced much – too much? – of our face-to-face communications, there are still essential offline learning opportunities as well, including seminars, book clubs, and numerous other special interest communities.
Remember to view this stage as a time to collect and reflect rather than narrow down. There will be plenty of occasions to ask mentors, at work or in your more intimate group of advisors, to help cull your findings and simplify your career improvement roadmap. The importance of Learning Curiosity as the ingredients you can choose from, as the hunter-gatherer stage, must not be overlooked if you intend to truly take control of your career.
Know Your Learning Style
It’s also a good idea to think about how you best like to learn —that is, what is your learning style? The pioneering research of Howard Gardner changed education by proving we have multiple intelligences that are relatively independent of one another; each of us are stronger in one or some areas than others.
At my firm, we adopt the research of educational theorist David Kolb, another pioneer in this field whose latest work resonates with the findings of our own practice. Kolb is a professor of organizational behavior at Case Western’s Weatheread School of Management. His seminal works on experiential learning theory and learning styles inventory show that people have a preferred phase or model of learning from one of the following:
- Experiencing: learning from experiences, being sensitive to feelings and people.
- Reflecting: reserving judgment, taking different perspectives, looking for meaning.
- Thinking: logically analyzing ideas, planning systematically, using concepts.
- Acting: showing an ability to get things done, taking risks, influencing.
Once you decide how you like to learn, you'll find it easier to map which associations, groups and various online resources to use in refining your vision and determine what matters most to achieve the career moves you’re aiming for.
My next post in this series focuses on the four strategies key to fueling your learning curiosity and getting you to the next stage in your life and career.
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