EveryMan Learning

Knowing how to learn is one of the skills in life that doesn’t necessarily come easily.  I recall when at school, I would respond best to the teacher out front who was amusing, spoke nicely and understood my dry sense of humour.  These things mattered for my self confidence.  Others in my cohort were perfectly happy just copying everything down from the board and not questionning anything teacher said or did.    Whether their learning came more easily is hard to say, but I needed more than dreary lessons.

I came alive when commercial subjects were available – I had to give up science to do typing and shorthand, but my parents figured these would stand any student in good stead throughout a lifetime of work, whereas sciences had a fairly limited appeal for normal life.  The ability to type brought great advances to me, it taught me how to appreciate all future training courses, online particularly.

One of the most useful things I learned in training courses over many years as a government worker was to get on with the task as soon as the email instruction arrived.  I was always in bother at school with homework for procrastination to the point that it was always done on the bus on the way to school – never a good idea.  This directly affected my chances of getting useable exam results and it took me a few years at real work to appreciate my methodology was rubbish.

So thereafter I have always taken training of any sort quite seriously.  Be it a first aid sampler, a customer service refresher, mandatory anti-fraud training.  I have read the instructions, read the purpose of the course and each element of each topic.  Once the point of the exercise is known, getting down to the learning is a doddle.  And often very rewarding.

A guiding hand when it comes to choosing careers, or just getting to grips with catching up on lost learning opportunities, that would be very helpful to just about everybody.  There are so many courses out there and it can be a bewildering exercise sifting through to find the exact combination of course material, helpful presentation and company expertise in helping  you use your newly gained skills to raise your game.

Knowing how best you sutdy also helps.  Some folk do like the sitting down with text book, note pad, endless sticky page markers etc. and they laboriously listen and note everything down.  This usually stores the relevant info in correct parts of their brain.  Whereas I much prefer the demonstration approach – the handbook for me is just another printed object – bring on the demonstrator to describe and show me how to do it, what happens if we don’t do it that way and how best to achieve my goals.