Caroline Slee-Poulos and Ron talk about How Learning Impacts Your Life

So how do you transfer? How do you understand? The students that you have in the classroom every day, how do you understand that they view learning and how it impacts their lives?

So the learning at school, they go to school for socialization to be around their friends as the primary. Their secondary is not wanting to discourage, disappoint their parents on their ability. And at work, it's very much the same thing. People go to work and they spend more time with their co-workers at work than they do with their families. And they're not really asked. At least up till now, they have not been asked to have continuous learning. And we're kind of at a pivot point, I think. Ed Gordon talks about it in his book, Future Jobs, but he did a series for us on our blogs called Future Shock. And his comment, we were having lunch a couple of weeks ago. And he said that by 2030, so I'll give him a pass and call it 2040. He said by 2030,50% of the workforce in the United States will not have the skills to perform the jobs that are necessary in the economy then. Of course, he's talking about technology. He's talking about changes in businesses. And if you look at the last 21 months. Working from home, like virtual learning, Zoom learning for students, where in the education results that we're seeing now, has really hurt the student. Their learning results, their absorption, their retention is down by more than 50%. And it becomes really significant socioeconomic regions. If you look at business, a lot of employees. working from home was a challenge to their employers. I don't see you working. I don't know that you're doing a job. What's going on here? As a teacher, you were originally asked to go to the school to do virtual learning as if you were a child that I had to have you come back to the workplace so I can see that you're actually working. How ludicrous is that? And then we now get to a place and you talked about here comes a new business system. And we have a series of things called paper to glass where the business systems have really failed us. All I've done is they've taken a piece of paper that I used to write on that had four to six copies. And now I've gone to a keyboard and I typed the same data into a screen that looks exactly like that piece of paper. It's what we call paper to glass. Alex Shushler coined that phrase from his time at SmartEquip, which is now a company owned by Ritchie Brothers. That transition, that learning circumstance, in fact, has not happened. So consider an employee who goes to work at 8 o 'clock in the morning and leaves work at 5 o 'clock at night, has a 30-minute lunch, a 15-minute break in the morning and the afternoon. and does the same thing every hour of every day for every week, for every month, for every year of his life or early. How motivating is that? How do you keep yourself excited? What's the opportunity? What are you looking forward to? Five o 'clock so I can get out of here. And don't get by the door because you're going to get run over. It's really how we transition, how we get the American. In fact, everybody in the world is going through this. To recognize that change is part of our lives. It's going to accelerate, not slow down. It's not going to end. And you're going to need to continually learn in order to stay where you are, if not get ahead. That's a key in somebody's head that I don't know how to access. To get them to understand they have to continually learn or they're going to be left behind.

Interesting, isn't it?

Well, the capacity to learn, the pool of understanding and knowledge changes with every generation. The thing that's going to be really mind altering is transitions so that at some point in time, you as an individual and your job function, you are blocking the natural progression for somebody to take your job. There should be a beginning and an end to a job function. the actualization of potential, the maximization of the learning on a particular job function. So if I start on the assembly line and all I'm going to do is put lug nuts onto a car to mount a wheel, am I going to do that for the next 50 years? Well, in the old days, that's what you did. So as an example, when I came out of the workforce, out into the workforce in 1968, I had people telling me, take your time finding a job, Ron, because you're going to be there for the rest of your life. That was true up till the baby boomers. And then horror for the world, people started changing jobs quickly, particularly with the world data processing, computers in those days, not information technology. You learned, you got good, and you went somewhere else because you had another challenge. Because there was a change, the power shifted from the employer to the employee. And that shift has continued to the point that South American countries, some companies have management take a year off every five years. Just go away. You have a sabbatical. You're fully paid. But you have to go to school. You have to learn something. It doesn't matter if it's applied to the job. You just have to learn something. And I've always wondered about that. The first company that I worked with, we had teams of people go to different parts of the world for a couple of weeks and look at different companies seeking out best practices and then bringing them back. Our owner was very enlightened for the time. This is the 1960s. There weren't many people that were doing that kind of thing. 20 groups came up after that where you shared that within your industry. But getting individuals to recognize that their job isn't just performing their job, but their job is continuing to learn. I don't think we have that message across to people yet.

In fact, statistics and surveys today are showing that people leave their current employment because of lack of engagement, because lack of a future. And we're seeing the last two or three months, at least in North America, we're seeing job. people leaving jobs at rates that have never been seen before, much, much higher than ever before. Now, to some degree, it's because it was stopped for 21 or 22 months. With the pandemic, people kept their head down and kept their jobs so that they were able to survive. But now that that period is over, I'm out of here. You guys have treated me badly. Or I'm not learning anymore. Where am I going to go? I better go somewhere else so that I have an opportunity for an advancement. And it's really critical. Learning is a lifelong event. Learning has to become part of our thinking as individuals, as people. Learning has to become a major element in how we look at our lives. And it has never been as prominent a need in our history as a planet as it is now. Learning is the tool that will allow you to achieve your potential, which we've talked about at Learning Without Scars. And it's also why we provide all those tools and resources, why we have blogs that are provoking people to think, why we have podcasts to get people to think about different things. Our newsletters do the same thing. Our audio learning tracks, the suggested reading. Everything that we do is aimed at stimulating you. as individuals to learn. I think that's what our purpose is in learning without scars. That's what our goal is. But you got anything more on the learning that you would like to add before we close this one off?

And the challenge there, I agree with you 100%. We need to learn how we learn. We need to understand how we learn. But we've also got a generational thing. A lot of the leadership today doesn't want you working from home. That's no good. I can't see you working. They're going to have to learn that there are some job functions that are done better from home than they are in the office. And that's going to change. Think about that infrastructure change, all those strip malls, all of those office buildings, all of that empty space. What the heck are we going to do with all of that? And it's going to be very interesting. Learning is a lifelong experience. It's a lifelong journey. And we need to get good at it. Let's close that this lessons learned discussion there. and move on to another one at a later date. So thank you, Caroline, for participating and contributing. And thank you all for listening to this Lessons Learned podcast. We look forward to having you with us again in the near future. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.