Skip to main content

Into the mindset of a Learning Professional

We are lucky. We have as careers, this amazing job, and passion of being in the learning world.

Our jobs (and passion) involve designing learning experiences for people. Children, adults, teams, professionals - whatever our audiences - our jobs are to make learning experiences amazing. (And just what does that mean - topic for another post).

(Conundrum: On the one hand if you have passion, you will learn, however, wherever - think Ekalavya - but on the other hand, a beautifully designed learning experience will take the learner to heights faster and might even light a fire of passion in them.)

What does it take for a person to be in this profession? What do you know about? What do you care about? How do you do that? Here are some of my thoughts:

Oodles of passion for one. If you are not passionate, you cannot be in the learning business. Unless you wake up excited each day imagining the possibilities of learning, this is not for you. What are you passionate about, ask them. And ask for an answer other than their job.

A lot of knowledge for another. And yet, an ability to step out of the traps of carefully laid learning paths that claim superiority of all other paths. (Holds true for much of life as well).

An open mind. Imagine a learning professional, who seeks to open minds, having a closed mindset herself.

Curiosity. A desire to experiment. After all this is human minds one is talking about. And unless you have those basic instincts how do you build those into your learning experiences.

A reasonable knowledge of behavior. Theoretical or Practical, this is very very important. Many of our experiences seek to reinforce or redirect behavior, so yes, a knowledge of behavior is invaluable.

A great understanding of what your customer wants. Stated. Unstated. Real. Imagined. Problem behind the problem. And so on and so forth. What they say and what they mean. So, knowledge of the behavior of those who enlist your help as well.

A learning attitude. Isn't that simple enough?

And once you have all of this, you want the person to know science, arts, commerce, engineering, medicine, psychology, technology, philospophy, dance, music, sports and then some. Ok, atleast a few of them. And there you have it, a complete learning professional.

Yes, each one of us is a learning professional, but there is no right definition. They come in many shapes and sizes, but yes, all of those listed above are good guiding principles. Has worked for me. YMMV. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call