According to the famous Spanish philosopher and pedagogue José Antonio Marina, young people who are currently entering the labour market will have to update their knowledge and skills in depth 10-14 times during their professional life. In this context, the ability to learn is by far the most important competence.
Chat GPT offers me four sources to reinforce this point:
1. “The Future of Work”, World Economic Forum report:
2. “Why Lifelong Learning Is the Key to a Thriving Career”, Harvard Business Review:
3. “The Future of Work in Latin America”, McKinsey Global Institute:
4. Skills Revolution Revisited”, ManpowerGroup:
The ability to learn in a new and changing context is known as learnability. Like any skill, it can be developed.
At Moebius we work on learnability from its three axes:
Create a good system. Conscious learning helps us to obtain significantly better results. It consists of becoming aware of how we are learning at each moment and the best way to do this is to have a clear and well-structured system. The deliberate practice of Ericsson, or the simple 3*3 of McKinsey will help us to take firm steps.
2.- Training skills. The process of learning something involves several cognitive skills that can also be trained. Simply summarising what you have learned in a moment helps you learn better. For us, though, the essential skill to learn better in this day and age is the ability to focus on what you are doing. Difficult to do in this age of digital distraction, but also trainable.
3.- The attitude of persevering with learning and learning from any experience, especially negative ones. Although I leave it for last, it is probably the most important and can also be cultivated. Here again, self-awareness is the basis for self-regulation. In our model, Carol Dweck’s growth mindset is essential.
There are many more for each axis and depending on the learning style we have, some will be better for us than others, but the important thing is to work on the three axes.
However, the key to this not-so-new skill is for each professional to have the commitment and autonomy to lead their own learning. In this sense, another important element to promote a culture of self-learning is for the corporate departments responsible to create an ecosystem that facilitates it. To this end, it makes sense for them to follow the same structure:
- To offer a system that allows me to systematise my entire learning process and not only the capture of content, but also the evolution of the practice process. Furthermore, to enrich the process by proposing new systems, metrics, dashboards that allow me to see my evolution, etc. Systems created from the “Learner” and the understanding of their learning process, not so much from my mission to provide content and measure its consumption.
- Train the possibility of developing the skills underlying learnability. For example, a technique to process new information is to summarise and publish on social media as a way to learn and also to work on my personal brand, do I offer my professionals the possibility to do so, have I trained them in the use of social media, personal brand and recommendations to align with the company’s policy, do I offer them the advice of a social media strategist, do I offer them the advice of a social media strategist? It is not training in personal branding, it is integrating a learning action so that they can work on their personal brand and have another tool to learn better in an intentional and explicit way. It deserves a separate mention to have a quiet space to learn, share and teach because it gives for several posts. Until then I just say long live “Learning Fridays”… “Mondays”, or any day of the week.
Fostering attitude is more complex, because it is more in the realm of the individual, but we can always expose our learners to other people who are role models in the attitude to learning. In addition, we can create new learning experiences so that they understand that learning is something that happens at different times, especially the most challenging ones.