There is this popular career advice that goes thus “Learn or earn. If you get nothing, then quit and move on”. As much as I agree with this, I have also come to understand how active and intentional one needs to be to follow it to a good extent. How much you earn is a reward for what you have done, are doing, or are expected to do – gravitating towards a sense of satisfaction, while learning is more about becoming better at whatever you chose, which then plays a role in how much you can earn in the nearest future.
The remuneration part is arguably the easiest one out of the two since this usually takes place during the interview process and is made explicit on your agreed binding contract after possibly multiple rounds of negotiations. It is also not a continuous process and therefore, requires less effort to stay active. Learning, on the other hand, is continuous and requires more effort. Learning carries as much importance as remuneration in that it has a direct correlation not only to your personal growth and impact but also to how motivated and optimistic you become about your contributions towards your organization’s goals.
It is, therefore, advisable that when you are choosing a new job, accepting a promotion, relocating to a new place or making a career pivot, you should optimize for both good remunerations as well as a good learning path. There are more than enough publications on how to be better at these two. However, this article will try to expand on how to become active with the latter.
However, the important question to ask remains, how do I become intentional and active as regards my professional learning? How can I achieve this in a more deterministic way?
We spend about one-third of our productive life on our professional careers and therefore, we must make it fundamental to how we and what we learn. The steps below enumerate what you can do to be active with your learning as it relates to your professional career in a measurable approach.
1. Self-evaluation:
It is very important to be able to identify where you stand right now. Presumably, you also know where you want to be in an estimated future time and all that is left is the path to follow to get there. There is, therefore, a need to evaluate where you are on your career journey, what you have in your skill toolset, and your proficiency level on them as well as those you don’t have but want to. This will help you to determine what your next level of priorities should be, what fits and what does not. It might help to take an audit of your previous activity and ask trusted friends, colleagues, and families about this to get a correct evaluation.
Using an example of a Software Engineer, you will need to draw out your skill matrix and identify where you are now as well as your next logical step. You can check out https://progression.fyi/ for examples of frameworks from some of the best organizations on both matrices as well as a career path.
2. Going after what fits
This goes beyond just identifying but also intentionally choosing what, who, and where will increase the feasibility of your identified next logical step. This might lead to you joining a new group of more knowledgeable persons, getting a mentor or a coach, buying and reading new books, paying for that training or course, attending relevant events, and changing departments or companies. Albeit a possibility, it is not a must that this must lead to a change of employer. This also helps you in filtering prospective job offers, since this now presents itself as an additional question to subject every seemingly exciting opportunity to. An additional question to ask that persuasive recruiter, a filtering yardstick for the career page of your favorite companies and a reasonable check on those recommendations coming through your career network.
3. ASK: Your Contact Persons
The moment you start the interview process is when you start asking the necessarily related questions to get as many answers as possible, from all the contact persons from the organization present throughout the interview process. This is the first way you can validate every point written on the career page and in the job description.
Questions like what learning looks like in the organization, the organization’s culture on collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing, if there exists an individual learning budget and how to access it, how the organization is structured for personal growth, how the organization innovates, do research and development exist. For a software and product-related position, how is the product organization structured, and what does the software delivery process look like? These are just examples of questions one can ask during the interview process.
4. ASK – Your Stakeholders
Identifying the people who are responsible or the system in place to aid your learning is the next line of action. This is the follow-up to the questions asked during the last step. The focus here is more on gathering more information about how well the organization supports learning and the definition of this support: regular training, reimbursement for personal training, regular learning programs, trial projects, career pathways, etc. This generally helps in determining the shape your learning will eventually take.
This is the point where you make your quest known to the identified and relevant persons and this often starts with aligning with your direct manager, then teammates and colleagues. The assumption here is that with the preceding steps, you are already in a team or company that looks right for you, and this step is for activation and making it right for you. Just as we are encouraged even in the bible, to ask so that we can receive https://www.bible.com/bible/97/LUK.11.9.MSG, you need to do the asking. Also, if you are struggling with asking due to cultural or other valid reasons, a book I will recommend for you to read is The Aladdin Factor [ https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/0425150755 ].
Depending on the size and structure of your organization, an inconspicuous benefit of doing this is how well it opens you up to receive information about opportunities that exist but are not [yet] written anywhere. You also get to know early enough about things that are possible to achieve, when they are possible, and those that are not. Lastly, it is very important to communicate this as needs and not wants.
5. Be dynamic with what’s obtainable but do not settle [For Long].
The graph of life is not in any way linear and expecting that things will go perfectly according to the way one plans it every time is delusional at best. Therefore, there is a need to be a bit flexible about the plan if they happen not to be going well as expected. Spending more time to understand why they are not momentarily achievable and factoring that into your decision is critical at this point. Situations like, there could be people ahead of you in your chosen learning path and your organization is prioritizing them, a start date of a much-coveted project just got moved due to external economic factors, or maybe your manager is a first-time manager who is also just learning about how to successfully navigate the culture of your organization. Things do take time sometimes, don’t be too hard on yourself.
However, your plan should also include a reasonable constraint within which you can operate and live with such unforeseen circumstances without feeling unhappy for long and should your stay in an organization fall below that, it might just be the best time to start working on your exit.
A useful question to ask at almost any point is this if I am to start making regular updates to my resume, will there be meaningful and impactful additions to make every time [month, quarter, year] if I continue along my present path?
To summarize:
- Have a professional career plan (short or long-term) with a focus on how much learning you would like to get.
- Lead your professional life with it.
{ 'Software' : { 'People', 'Products' } } 
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