Be Different or be dead

November 15, 2010

Why learning all the time will make your career insanely successful

Source: Unsplash

Why learning all the time will make your career insanely successful.

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 its 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 marketing 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.

Strategic learning

Here’s how the strategic learning process worked for me:

— List the top three challenges your organization faces. For example, let’s assume they are: declining customer loyalty and market share, reduced product margins and virtually no marketing innovation.

— Determine the learning competencies that you need to adopt. In my case it was marketing

— List your subject matter expertise categories - finance, problem solving, mathematics.

— Determine your learning gap - marketing

— 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. My mentor is Seth Godin.

— Gather relevant reading material, attend conferences, contact service quality consultants and start learning.

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

Early in my career the telecom industry was transforming from a virtual monopoly to an intensely competitive business. With more competition coming, 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.

The big picture was marketing.

My formal education was mathematics and computer science and my previous jobs had contributed systems & productivity analysis experience. 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 modicum 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 the VP position then on to Senior VP and later in my career to EVP & Chief Marketing Officer.

I was often asked how I managed to get on this career path 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.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 11.15.10 at 11:59 am by Roy Osing
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