Meet Pete. At
school, Pete was a star rugby player. He was scouted and joined the training
programme for the Under 19s at the national academy. For the last seven years,
he has played professional rugby. Now, because of an injury, his career as a
professional rugby player is coming to an end. Pete is financially comfortable
for now but he is only 29 and has a family. What options does Pete have to
ensure that he and his family live comfortably for the rest of his life?
Explore the Adjacent
Leveraging the experience
he has gained as a professional rugby player, Pete can look at work
opportunities that are, so to speak, adjacent to where he is. These would
include becoming a coach, or a commentator, or a journalist, or a rugby video
analyst for a TV channel.
Leapfrog
Alternately, Pete
could consider leveraging the core dispositions he has acquired playing
professional rugby – team player who is good at empathetic collaboration, good
leadership skills, quick decision making, determination, resilience, grit,
stamina to put in hard work and ability to remain calm under pressure. Having
the mindset of a sports person – who knows he has to play to win but if he
loses he should accept defeat gracefully and strive to do better next time –
will give him the gumption to venture into unchartered waters ever ready to
bounce back even if he faces failure.
Of course, in the
new pursuit, he will have to learn new skills and acquire knowledge in new
domains. Say Pete applies to a hotel for a middle-management job. His people
skills, ability to inspire juniors, ability to remain calm under pressure and
ability put in tonnes of hard work will be big positives. However, Pete will
also have to make sure he becomes a self-motivated learner who can learn at an
accelerated pace about his new responsibilities, which could be related to
marketing, catering, HR, customer relations, event management, or other
functions required for the smooth running of a hotel.
Learning Missions and Personal Learning Networks
To climb the career
ladder in the hotel towards more general management roles, Pete will have to
gain experience in different functions in the hotel. For this, not having the
luxury of taking long sabbaticals, he will have to acquire the ability to learn
on the job, fast.
It will help if
Pete sets Learning Missions for himself, to quickly gain expertise in any field
or area. The first requirement of a Learning Mission is understanding what are
the key concepts that need to be learnt in order to gain mastery of a
particular domain and then setting clear learning goals to learn these
fundamental concepts (and more) in a given time frame. Learning Missions also
include formulating questions that lead to deeper comprehension and creating
Personal Learning Networks of resource people, both online and offline, who can
answer these questions and give expert guidance.
As
Pete becomes better at learning new things fast, he will realise that being a
self-directed learner means answering three questions:
-
What is worth
learning? (related to desired outcomes in the given context)
-
How will I learn
this? (using online and offline learning resources and building Personal
Learning Networks)
-
How will I know I
have learnt this well? (creating performances of understanding to check level of
knowledge in the new domain, which could be real-world application of knowledge
in Pete’s case)
As Pete climbs the
corporate ladder that requires going on more and more Learning Missions, he
will become a better learner, who is self-directed, intrinsically motivated and
learns-to-learn at an accelerated pace
Reinventing
Yourself
Much like Pete,
with technology and other disruptors constantly changing the economic
landscape, and in such a scenario looking for promotions, job hopping, becoming
a freelancer in the gig economy, or becoming an entrepreneur, you too need to
learn to constantly reinvent yourself in order to thrive. Such reinvention of
self requires work at two levels:
Intrinsic
On
the one hand, reinvention includes working on your mindset, dispositions and
changing the way you think, and on the other, it implies acquiring new
knowledge, skills and competencies. Ability to accelerate the rate at which you
learn, unlearn and relearn dispositions, skills and knowledge are the key
factors, for which you need to first set for yourself Learning Missions and
then pursue them with military-like focus and zeal.
External
Besides
working on yourself, successful reinvention also includes the ability to create
a meaningful network that helps open doors (not collecting a stack of name
cards but establishing meaningful relationships) and finding the right mentors
who can give you judicious guidance.
Some would argue
that luck, chance and fate also play a role in your success. Even if that be
the case, the point is that you have no control over these factors. You can
only address that which is in your control. So keep working on your
dispositions, keep acquiring new knowledge, skills and competencies, keep
reinventing yourself and there is a high probability you will flourish even in
fast changing times.
