#MiPDV – Learning Something New

Suppose you just learned a new skill – something that will be helpful to your current job role or the job you’re trying to get. 

What do you do next? You probably first think of how you can benefit from the new knowledge or skills. 

Do you think about how your colleagues could benefit from the same knowledge? 

Would your customers (internal or external) want to know about the skills you learned? 

Personally, I’ve found that it’s helpful to think about all of these areas, and to take steps to reinforce the learning. For example: 

• If you can use the skills to help your colleagues, you not only display leadership, you create an environment of trust and respect between you and your colleagues.
• Your customers would probably like to take advantage of the new skills that could help their business in some way. 

If you don’t use the skills, they will atrophy, and you’ll lose them … this situation helps no one. Think you’re able to remember? Even as far back as the 1880’s (not a typo), Hermann Ebbinghaus created the Forgetting Curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve . His research found that we begin forgetting new knowledge within an hour of learning https://archive.org/details/memorycontributi00ebbiuoft/page/76/mode/2up .

But what could you do after you’ve thought about these situations? 

I’ve found it’s good to speak with your manager to explore opportunities to use the new skills. For example, your manager can: 

• Consult with their peers to sponsor a training session where you teach the new skills to your peers.
• Help you identify opportunities to use the skills in your customer set.
• Look for additional assignments that can use your skills. 

In my experience, teaching a new skill to your peers has been especially helpful in improving my retention. As an example, early in my career I was deeply interested in IT capacity planning – helping customers understand how much of their system capacity they were using, the growth rate, and planning for the next upgrade. 

The company I worked for had some excellent capacity planning tools, but they didn’t teach you how the calculations were done. Instead, they taught you how to gather the right input, enter it, and to interpret the output. 

While helpful, knowing only how to interpret the output did not prepare you for questions when you presented the results to the customer. 

To learn how the modeling worked, I took a queueing theory course – not a particularly exciting topic except to math geeks, but necessary to understand how the tools worked. Once I completed the course and felt I really understood the material, I set up a class to teach queueing theory to my peers. 

I would have been happy if a handful of people showed up. Instead, I had over 40 people attend, including many of the senior level people I used for advice and counsel. Turns out that they didn’t understand the tools, either! 

Even better, after the class I taught, these senior level people began asking me to present capacity planning to their customers. Suddenly, I had a skill that was in demand by customers across several offices. It certainly felt good to be asked to help, and the extra practice deepened my skills. 

More importantly, being willing to help colleagues led to new job opportunities at the company. 

All because I shared a new skill. 

The leadership lesson I learned was to encourage every team member to look for opportunities to grow their skills, then put them to use quickly. 

You and your team members will be glad you did. 

That’s mi punto de vista #MiPDV.