How to Develop Continuous Learners

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Amid the ever-increasing frequency and complexity of job changes and career transitions people experience, the notion of “one life, one career” has given rise to the phenomenon of a “portfolio career” that comprises a variety of roles. Education is also expected to shift from front-end loading early in life to continuous development throughout one’s work life.

Acquiring and developing new skills has never been more important than it is today, when organizations are quickly adapting in response to disruptive forces in geopolitics, climate change, and technology. The World Economic Forum estimates that 44% of core skills will change by 2027, necessitating widespread upskilling and reskilling. Similarly, PwC research shows that 79% of CEOs globally are concerned that skills shortages will hinder their company’s growth. 

Despite the compelling pressure to engage in continuous learning, employees face formidable challenges in finding time and energy to pursue it.   To cope up with the challenge, based on their research, the authors introduced the concept of ‘learning agility’. Learning agility is a process-oriented methodology rather than a content-focused learning skill like mind mapping or other memorization techniques. The authors identified the four elements that matter most in developing learning agility: 

1. Linking Purpose to Learning.  Without motivation, there’s no battery power for learning. The authors’ regression analyses showed that having a sense of purpose for learning predicts the successful development of skills and capabilities. The sense that what we learn will make a difference motivates us to prioritize learning — and managers can link learning any new skill to an employee’s sense of purpose.
2. Creating a Learning-Rich Work Environment.  Creating a learning-rich work environment is the most critical workplace factor in fostering agility in skill acquisition, and it’s the second-most-important predictor of skill development, after purpose. A learning-rich job is defined as having work or diverse tasks out of one’s comfort zone that requires the application of new skills in different domains to succeed.  Drawing on business strategies and projects to create learning-rich opportunities, managers can extend employees’ development through experiments, projects, milestones, or assignments based on adjacent skills and complementary domains.
3. Asking Meta-Learning Questions.  The ability to reflect on one’s own learning process goes beyond learning techniques like mind mapping or heuristics; it’s about refining the way we approach growth. Meta-learning is the ability to stand back and think about what we want to learn, how to learn, the strengths and gaps in our learning process, and how to improve our learning. 
4. Nurturing a Learning Team.  Being in a diverse team to exchange resources readily and give and receive prompt feedback makes learning a fun and powerful norm.  Managers can foster development-focused teams through regular routines. For example, they can support an employee in making it a weekly priority to learn something that will help them in their current work, such as reading a book, learning how to use a new AI tool, or attending a talk. Teams can allocate 15 to 30 minutes in regular meetings for everyone to share their learning periodically.