How to Learn at Work

This is how people used to learn work skills.

In reality, it was the only reliable way to attain work-related skills. Most people did not attend school, and the expertise needed for these types of jobs resided in the workplace itself. So, apprentices learned from masters, gaining a little knowledge regularly every day until they became masters themselves, able to pass their skills on to the next generation.

Of course, today’s needs are very different. Instead of around 20 trades, there are almost a thousand different types of occupation. Nearly every job requires basic literacy and numeracy, and instead of just a select few going to school, now, in most countries, everyone does.

As a result, we now have a complex web of schooling, internships, and professional development, which, at least in theory, should allow anyone to build the skills they need to take on any job and thrive in it.

However, when it comes to durable skills, in most cases, people are not learning them the right way, despite the fact that they are some of the most important skills you can possibly develop. For these types of skills, elements of how employees originally learned a trade are the most effective. If you, as an employee, can recreate those elements, you will benefit hugely.

Here’s why

What’s Unusual about Durable Skills (i.e. why this is complicated)

Not all skills are the same. Many job-specific skills can be highly complex but are usually defined with great specificity. Take, for example, something I used to do—write code. When you learn to write code, you are basically learning a set of rules, and once you’ve mastered those rules, you can do the job. Will you be writing the most elegant code? No. That comes with practice and additional study, but you can do the job, and there is a fairly standard way to learn how to do it.

Now, compare this type of learning to a skill that involves or is even dependent upon a physical component – such as playing soccer, learning the piano, or becoming a blacksmith. In each of these cases, there is an additional element – implementing that skill with your unique body. My stubby fingers won’t reach the piano keys in the same way yours will. My 5 ft 7-inch frame won’t kick a football in the same way or swing a hammer.

Durable skills are actually much more similar to these physical skills – because they deal with human traits, and humans are all unique. The durable skills you develop are actually YOUR unique set of skills based on who you are and how your brain is wired. You’ve probably seen this if you have tried to implement a productivity system someone else invented and failed abysmally. It doesn’t fail because you are lazy or stupid, it fails because it was built for them, not you.

And there are additional layers of complexity on top of that. Durable skills aren’t just about you as an individual; they are about how you interact with other unique humans in unique work environments. And ALL of those things – you, the people you interact with, and your environment, change over time.

Getting Strategic about Building Durable Skills

The consequence of all this complexity is that while technical skills can often be developed fairly traditionally, durable skills development needs a different approach.

Here are three important strategies, which, if you adopt them, will almost certainly pay off over time. All of them happened naturally as part of apprenticeships but can be recreated relatively easily in the modern world of work.

Strategy 1: A Little And Often

You might go to company offsites that try to teach you durable skills. You might even enjoy them. But know this – they are proven not to work. 90% of the concepts are forgotten within a month. Learning in this way is the equivalent of going to the gym for a full day once a month and expecting to get fit.

Durable skills are like muscles. They develop with regular, purposeful practice, and they degrade without that practice.

We’ve found that the optimal time for purposeful practice — active learning of durable skills — is around 10 minutes a day, but 10 focused minutes. This builds over time and helps make you so much better at the intangibles of great work. So, put 10 minutes on your calendar every day to work on your durable skills and make that time non-negotiable.

Strategy 2: Learn Then Do

Learn then Do is a very simple idea and is at the heart of experiential learning. The idea here is to spend a short period of time understanding a principle and then a slightly longer period of time practicing that principle. If you’ve used something like Simply Piano, you’ve seen it in action, and if you’ve been through any of our BillionMinds programs, you are implementing it every day. The reason this works so well is that the learning period is short enough to ensure that the concepts are genuinely internalized, and the practice helps embed those concepts. Then, through the rest of the day, you are likely to see OTHER opportunities to practice the skill, further helping the learning stick.

Strategy 3: Learn FROM Do

Think of this as the flip of learning then doing, but it’s at least as necessary. In this case, you are finding every opportunity to learn from the activities you have just performed – whether it was attending a meeting, writing an e-mail, or delivering a presentation. Everything you do every day is an opportunity to grow your durable skills, and the vast majority of people miss those opportunities. Don’t let that be you.

Surprisingly, given all the complexity I’ve discussed about durable skills – the act of building them and sustaining them is really not that complicated. If you can commit yourself to repeated daily practice, get more conscious about the skills you are developing, and use every opportunity to learn from what you do, you will easily be in the top 5% of people with the skills that consistently lead to being hired, retained, and promoted.

It’s worth the investment, don’t you think?