You often hear people say “those who stop learning, stop growing”, and in a sector like IT nothing could be truer.
Every day there is a great deal of news, and a continuous process of updating and training is essential to keep pace with all the new solutions that the various software houses and providers bring to the market, so as not to miss important opportunities.
For IT consultants, continuous training is their daily bread, both in the form of internal training and as the provision of know-how to the outside world, presenting new solutions and tools that make companies’ IT processes ever more efficient and that are always useful to IT professionals.
“The only constant is change” Heraclitus
What do we mean by continuous learning?
Continuous learning is the process of acquiring new skills and knowledge on an ongoing basis, which allows us to rise to the challenges of the fluid context in which we are immersed.
This learning mechanism can take different forms, from the formal course to casual social learning.
At a professional level, continuous learning consists of constantly broadening one’s skill set in line with the evolution and ongoing developments of the relevant context.
Why is continuous learning important for companies?
For organisations, being competitive in the global market means developing innovative approaches and strategies that can adapt to a constantly evolving environment.
Achieving these goals depends on the knowledge and skills of the team.
But how can these qualities be developed?
The key words of this process are:
- retail training
- learning.
People need to learn new things and develop new skills in order to take on a different perspective and take the next step.
When organisations do not support a continuous learning process, innovation does not happen and processes remain unchanged.
Employees must be able to challenge themselves. Learning must be flexible, on-demand and continuous in order to contribute to this kind of cutting-edge performance.
What are the benefits of continuous learning?
Creating a learning culture within the organisation is an effective way to improve performance and innovation, as mentioned earlier, but employee satisfaction and retention are also essential.
Here is why:
Knowledge is:
- power
The more trained employees are, the more skills they acquire and the more they can contribute within the organisation.
- More cost-effective. Investing in employee development is less expensive than retraining new employees.
- Showing that employees are valued. Supporting continuous learning shows that employees are worth the investment and that the organisation is genuinely committed to developing their careers.
Here is why:
- Top Performer. Developing new skills and knowledge increases personal performance and competence in one’s own job.
- Career development.
Additional training, education or skills development can help people who are pursuing a career path or who wish to obtain a new position to achieve their goals.
- Licences and certifications. Pursuing additional learning is also important for employees who need to obtain and renew professional licences or certifications.
- Promotions or incentives. Spending time learning a new skill and gaining new knowledge can benefit job performance and influence future promotion or financial incentives.
- Personal enrichment. A person’s interests often go beyond the work they do every day. Pursuing interests outside work can lead to insights and developments that open the door to new opportunities in the future.
- Staying “on the ball”.
Keeping up to date with the trends and advances in one’s profession can help an employee improve their position in the job market.
Instilling a culture of continuous learning
Although this has happened for a number of reasons, the main culprits of this inexplicable delay have been the companies themselves: they have not managed to instil a culture of continuous learning.
In practice, they should have implemented, in good time, policies designed to increase and foster the development of their human resources’ skills.
In times of extreme difficulty, such as the present one, facing change would certainly have come more naturally.
To grasp the real scale of the phenomenon before the outbreak of the emergency, it is useful to know that, according to a recent Eurostat survey of the European Union (EU) workforce aged between 25 and 64, in 2019 the participation rate in Lifelong Learning (or Continuous Learning) in the EU stood at 11.3%, 0.2 percentage points above the 2018 rate. The rate has risen gradually since 2015, when it was only 10.7%.
Encouraging people’s ability to adapt
Faced with a specific business need, companies require the person best suited to meet it. So far, so good.
The next step should be to align the knowledge of one or more people potentially able to meet that need with a targeted training path that not only fulfils the company’s pressing requirements but also, and above all, “adds value” to those workers.
Companies often prefer to turn to the market without first checking whether they can help their own employees grow and make the most of them. There has never been a bigger mistake.
Or rather, for some roles a certain degree of discontinuity is obviously necessary, especially at management level. But in most cases this is not necessary.
Quite the opposite. Had they invested in their people well in advance, in a structured and continuous way, perhaps today they would not be complaining about the widespread skills shortage we so often read about in the newspapers.
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