Why Lifelong Learning Is Becoming a Non-Negotiable Career Advantage
The world is moving quickly. With new tech constantly being developed, the exchange of information is becoming faster every day. Of course, this unprecedented access to information leeches into our daily life, and even our work.
When looking for a job, it’s no longer enough to have a qualification and experience. Now, employees need to show their employers that they’re willing to go the extra mile, that they’re willing to stand out at their jobs by continuously learning new skills, improving their current skill set, or upskilling. This process is called “lifelong learning.”
Institutions like Rockhurst University offer many courses and workshops that can help people with their lifelong learning goals and desires, and similar programs are becoming more and more popular all the time. But why do employers look for people with continuous learning skills?
Or rather, what is it exactly about lifelong learning that makes people who do it so valuable to companies and the people who run them?
A Curious Mind
The reason that employers find such value in people engaged in lifelong learning, in the simplest terms, is that the pursuit of knowledge through one’s entire life betrays certain personality traits.
For one thing, a person who is consistently seeking to learn new things is typically going to be someone with an innate sense of curiosity – someone not afraid to ask “why?” Granted, some employers and companies would rather their employees just come in and do their job. They believe that employees are there to be seen and not heard, and that’s just the way of it. They fail to recognise that employees are unique people, with unique brains and insights.
Curiosity isn’t just people asking questions, it’s people then developing on the answers to those questions. When people ask “why,” it’s not to question authority, but to understand the reasoning behind a process, and the answer can potentially help them do it better, or find a better way of doing it.
People who practise lifelong learning are usually naturally curious. This curiosity leads to innovation, which can be hugely beneficial to the company. Most successful CEOs and employers understand this, and so readily hire people who show a penchant for curiosity.
The Pursuit of Excellence
Additionally, lifelong learning is more than just the pursuit of the correct answers at trivia night. It’s the intentional pursuit of the mastery of skills, abilities, and techniques. It’s keeping up to date with industry trends, the formulation, and follow-through of ideas.
Learning throughout a person’s entire life shows commitment to the pursuit of excellence in relevant skills. It’s the initiative to seek constant improvement, and any employee who ensures that they have the most up-to-date information about their work should be a welcome addition to any company.
Lifelong learning shows employers that if you don’t have answers, you’ll find them. If there’s a shortcoming in your work, you will address it. If there’s someone to trust with a task that demands nothing short of excellence, you’re the person to do it.
Willing to Accept Feedback
An employee who is continuously learning is an employee who knows two things:
- They won’t always get everything right.
- They know how to learn from their mistakes.
Anyone who is continuously seeking education or spending time in the education system is someone who’s going to be familiar with the process of getting to grips with new concepts and processes. This journey is one that often involves making mistakes in the early days, but they don’t let that initial setback get them down. It’s more likely that someone who engages in lifelong learning will be good at recognizing when they need help, when they’ve made a mistake, and how to take feedback on board so they can improve and do their job better next time.
A Wealth of Skills
Most jobs are multi-faceted in their completion. Most of the time, what looks simple from the outside requires an extraordinary amount of mental labour, and what some may typically think of as a single skill is actually a multi-disciplinary mixing pot of instinct, knowledge, experience, and skills gained outside the sphere of the work.
For example, when people look at writers, they may think that it’s simply putting words on a page, just a few hundred lines of waffling after a few minutes of research, right?
Wrong.
Being a writer involves hours of research, which in itself takes numerous skills such as critical thought, investigative and deductive logic, fact-checking, and chasing down credible sources. Then they have to condense that information in their own words, in a way that communicates it honestly and that the typical person can understand. They need to do all this while making sure the content is entertaining and/or informative enough for its purposes. And this is just writing as a blanket job, it doesn’t even take into account writing for marketing, fiction, prose, poetry, news and journalism, technical writing, bid writing, etc.
The point is, being good at any job takes more than excelling at a single core skill, and when an employer sees that you’re engaging in constant education and lifelong learning, it shows them that you’re someone who’s keeping all of those skills and talents updated. You’re remaining informed, up-to-date, and sharp, and that’s worth a lot these days.
Learning for Life
While it may just be a way to keep food on the table, there are a whole host of benefits to lifelong learning. From the economic to the mental, lifelong learning has shown to be a chief contributor to satisfaction, a sense of purpose, and engagement in work and life. Not only that, but we live in an inherently interesting world. Dedicating your life to learning about it is not just something to undertake for your career benefit, but to open your mind and expand the role you play in that world.
Sounds pretty good to us.
