BE DiFFERENT or be dead Blog

November 15, 2010

BE DiFFERENT YOU! The Voracious Career Learner

Are you a continuous Career Learner? Or, have you assumed that your formal education and job experience - previous and current - have generated all the intellectual property that you need to help your organization reach greater levels of performance and as a result enhance your career? Career learning is an imperative. Many don’t take the time to do it so it represents a critical component of personal differentiation. It involves acquiring completely new levels of knowledge outside of what you now know and what your jobs have taught you. A Career Learner makes a difference to the organization and develops immunity to survive.

Career Learners determine what is important to the organization and they are constantly learning about topics that can help. Consider this Strategic Learning as opposed to more casual learning where you focus on a subject that only interests YOU. Hopefully you can satisfy both objectives: learn something that interests you and also benefits the organization. But your priority should be to focus on an area that will provide benefits to your organization. If sales effectiveness is an issue, for example, go find out what the sales pundits are saying about the subject and what direction they are advocating. Learn about the options; determine which one is appropriate for your organization and modify it to fit your unique circumstances.

Here’s how the Strategic Learning Process works by way of example:
1. List the top three challenges your organization faces - declining market share, reduced margins and plummeting service quality results could be examples.
2. Determine the learning competencies that require adoption - marketing and serving customers
3. List your subject matter expertise categories - finance and marketing
4. Determine your learning gap - serving customers
5. Target the subject matter experts to fill your learning gap - there are numerous sources - authors as well as consulting organizations - that specialize in the topic of service quality. Find one or two that you find potentially productive.
6. Purchase relevant reading material, attend conferences, contact service quality consultants and start learning.
Strategic learning starts with the needs of the organization.

Hand-in-hand with learning is the application of new knowledge to enhance organizational performance. If knowledge is not applied to drive better results it really has little value. So, as you are engaged in the learning process, always be thinking about how you could possibly apply it or some version of it to make it useful to your organization. If knowledge isn’t applied to drive results it has no value - it’s about execution.

In the early part of my career I was transferred from Vancouver to Ottawa, Ontario to take a junior Pricing Analyst position for the Trans Canada Telephone System. The Telecom industry at that time was beginning a transformation from a virtual monopoly to an intensely competitive business. It occurred to me that with more competition coming in the industry, being a Pricing expert was simply not good enough; the competitive battle was going to be won or lost over the customer and the winner would be the company that did the best job of understanding and responding to customer needs. Price was an important component of the challenge, but the BIG picture was marketing.

My formal education was Mathematics and Computer Science and my previous job experience had contributed systems & productivity analysis as well as Pricing. There was much to learn if I wanted to gain any proficiency in marketing and make myself of value as the company moved forward to do battle in the competitive arena. I was infatuated with marketing and read everything that I could get my hands on concerning the topic. Within a year and a half I felt that I had at least a degree of intellectual competency that would make me a viable consideration for future opportunities when they came available. Obviously I needed to get into a position where I could practice marketing and show my stuff, but the first task was to be able to discuss and demonstrate that I understood marketing principles and concepts enough to earn the right to practice them.

The result of my career learning’s in marketing were gratifying, leading me to my first Officer position as VP Network Marketing, then on to Senior VP Marketing and later in my career to EVP & Chief Marketing Officer. In addition, I had the good fortune to successfully lead major Operating Divisions of the company by applying the strategic marketing competencies I had acquired. In fact I was the only Operations Executive with a marketing background and was therefore able to BE DiFFERENT from my peers who came up through the Operations ranks with no formal marketing background.

I was often asked how I managed to get these rather prestigious positions since I only had a math and computer background and had no formal education in marketing. The answer: a passion for career learning in marketing and the courage to apply new marketing ideas to BE DiFFERENT.

Stay tuned for the next YOU Article.

Cheers,
Roy