Learning Strategies at Work

In today’s fast paced workplace, you need to learn fast to keep pace with your industry, your customers, and your peers. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineer trying to keep up with the latest frameworks and learn new APIs or a sales person applying the newest sales methodology and learning about your customer’s businesses, its a competitive edge to learn faster [1]. 

Learning at work is not like learning in school. We need different strategies then what helped us pass a test. 

What’s the best strategy to learn at work? 

From talking to a couple dozen peers, I’ve narrowed down “how people learn at work” to four foundations: 

1. Work on projects

2. Learn from your team  

3. Read blogs / books / etc. 

4. Listen to podcasts / audio books / etc. 

These four foundations are then grouped into two categories, experiential learning and consumption learning, and offer a few suggestions on how to get the most out of both types of learning. 

Experiential Learning

The first two, project learning and learning from your team I group in a category of experiential learning. 

Raise your hand if you identify here? 

Most people do as this makes up the bulk of learning on the job. You learn by being in the arena. 

To make experiential learning more effective you want to design a system to capture the lessons as they’re flying by you. 

Project learning is a phenomenal approach because of the obvious motivation of getting the project done. This is, after all, what you are getting paid for after all. 

Execute a project and learn what you need to learn to accomplish the project. There are few learning techniques more effective than being in the trenches of knocking out projects. 

Can we make project learning more effective? Absolutely. I recommend a 5-minute daily reflection ritual at a minimum. 

If you think about this question each day, you’ll help make the project based lessons more visceral. 

Additionally, use time at the end of a project to reflect on what you learned. In my learning journal I have many posts titled “lessons learned for Project [X]” where I reflect on what worked and what didn’t. 

Learning from your team can also be one of the best learning strategies at work. Peers who are smart, ambitious and energetic can help raise the quality of your work and teach you how to be better at your job. 

Here are a few practical action steps you can try out: 

• 5-minute end of day reflection ritual (same as project based learning above)

• Take co workers to lunch and ask them to teach you. What drives them? How do they learn? Take a notepad and write down what you learn. 

• Ask for feedback. There’s an art to asking for feedback (future post) but you should do it often. How did you come across? What feedback would they have for you? Thank them for their feedback. 

Consumption Learning 

The next two pillars of learning I group into a category called consumption learning. 

Consumption learning is consuming information. We consume through many different mediums: reading blogs, watching YouTube, listening to podcasts, etc. 

Using smart learning techniques we can super charge this learning area. 

Here’s what I recommend: 

• When you read an insight [2] you want to remember write it down in your learning journal and plan to review / quiz yourself on it again in the future. The “in the future” part of this is called spaced repetition. Increase the frequency you quiz yourself on an insight the more important it is to you. 

• Level up “review” sessions by quizzing yourself. You can do this easily with ChatGPT. Give the insights (or even a podcast or blog URL) to ChatGPT and ask it to create a custom quiz for you and grade you on your answers. The quizzing uses a learning technique called retrieval practice which is a very effective way to make insights stick in your brain. 

If you use these two techniques, spaced repetition and retrieval practice, you’ll make the hours and hours you spend consuming information much more effective. Learning research has consensus on this. 

But don’t take my word for it. Try it out! 

[1] I’m primarily focused on the day to day of a knowledge worker, but these ideas can extend to other types of work. 

[2] An insight can be anything you think is valuable and you want to remember. For example, an insight I read recently is that the multiple for SaaS companies has dropped down to a 6x multiple. I want to remember this because it helps me think through investing and fundraising strategies.