Continuous Learning & Development

Many people come to me to seek advice about career development. There are a few good things I came across in the many years I was involved in professional development that I would like to share. Let me give you my three high level principles for sustainable development.

1) “Act always so as to increase the number of choices.” Heinz von Foerster 
2) Past behavior predicts future behavior
3) Build win-win relationships

1) “Act always so as to increase the number of choices.” Heinz von Foerster 
Change is inevitable and it is this constant change that will feed us.
To prepare for change it is important to continuously learn by constantly looking for new challenges inside and outside of your current job or in between jobs or prior to your first ever employment. To collect a broad experience in diverse fields is the best way to increase your choices. Too narrow experience will limit your choices as you move forward in your career. To collect the experience it is important to do things and not just read books about them or get a certificate through attending training.

“The only way you provide security for yourself is by making sure that your work experience is as up-to-date as possible so that if tomorrow happens, you are able to go out and get another job because you have skills people want. That’s the only way you have security. You aren’t going to get it from the company. It will never be that way again.” Noer, David M.: Healing The Wounds – Overcoming The Trauma of Layoffs and Revitalizing Downsized Organizations; Jossey-Bass, 1993, Page 15

I have written already some blog posts around this topic:
Eight Best Practices For Your Employability
List of Developmental Assignments 2.0

2) Past behavior predicts future behavior
Just imagine if you were to hire someone. Just think about any job at home or in your work for which you had received a few applications. Whom would you most likely hire?
Most people that hire someone need to feel comfortable about this person being able to do the job. So most likely they will look at past experiences and performance related to this new job to predict if you would be successful. Depending on the shortage of talent this relation between past experience and job applied for might vary. But definitely will you increase your opportunities to get jobs through the more diverse experiences you have had.
A good excercise I like to recommend is to look back at what achievements (experiences) you already had. This is an excercise which takes a lot more time than you would expect. My advise is to try to take a minimum of 5 minutes of your time every day and write down whatever comes to your mind when you look back at past achievements. Collect any achievement from your school time, private time or any job you did.
How they finally should look like and the best practices to get there is well described in this article: How to write achievements for your CV

3) Build win-win relationships
Any relationship will finally turn sour if there is no win-win. It is just a matter of time.
But how to build a win-win relationship? I talked and read a lot about it. The one book that gives you the best strategy to build win-win relationships is actually a book about strategic selling. I know many people will shrug when I tell them. Selling is often perceived as being manipulated in to buying something. But hold most vendor customer relationships are long-term and not onetime. Sales people have the challenge every day to build and maintain win-win relationships. This book describes an excellent process to build win-win relationships that has worked successfully since many years for the majority of the fortune 1000 companies. You can use this process for any kind of successful relationship building in your life.What I found most useful in this process is the analysis of your position. In the first step the authors recommend to identify all relevant changes that could potentially influence your position and in the second step to rate them as opportunities or threats. In step 3 the single current sales objective is defined which would translate into your next step in your career development.Once you put down all the items that you perceive as change around you and which could potentially have an influence on your career opportunities you start to get a clearer picture of your position in the organization or on the job market. Too often I have seen even senior people being overwhelmed by changes in the organization even though these changes were already predicted long time ago. Too often it is the announcement of the change that has taken place that actually woke up most people. But isn’t this a bit too late?

What the list will do for you after you rate all the items it will start to make you think specifically what action you could take on each of the items. If it is a threat than you look for a mitigation action or if it is an opportunity than you would look for the next action to take in order to profit from it.But be aware in between you starting to act strategically on each item and having listed them all there will be a moment of emotion. It is important to rate this emotion. Do you feel panic or are you overly euphoric?  These emotions will tell you watch out you have to seriously do something in order to stay on track.

The ideal emotion is to feel between okay and concerned. By working through the actions for each of your listed item which could potentially take a few weeks or months always take a snapshot of your emotion. The aim is to get to this point where you feel between okay and concerned.

Your list should be a list in progress. Changes happen. So you need to list each new change and rate it as you go along. But this is only the starting point of your journey to more sustainable growth. Actually you need to get to the right people which have an influence on your career. And they are not that obvious always and you need to identify them carefully. But why don’t you go and read the book and follow this process that was proven highly effective and successful over and over again since many years in the real world .

I will be collecting interesting free learning resources that I find on the web.
Main focus will be on soft skills.

New: Time Management
If time is well managed and invested it will clear the way for future growth and success.
Professor Randy Pausch gives an overview of the latest techniques around time management and shares his own experience. And he knows what he is speaking about: “According to his doctors, computer science professor Randy Pausch has three to six months to live due to cancer, and in this video lecture he shares his tips for making the most of your time, “the most precious commodity you have.”" Pausch, Randy: Lecture on Time Management, Video, 08 April 2008, Lifehacker.com

What is the best way to learn from this video ? My recommendation is to write down any idea or technique Professor Randy Pausch is talking about while watching this video. If you do not research has shown that you are very likely to keep only keep 20% of the information received through this video.

Once you have collected all ideas and techniques from this lecture go through the list and define an action to take for each item.  To put your learning into action is key in the retention of this new aquired knowledge. To take action will also support your evaluation of this new knowledge.

Another recommendation is to break actions that would require a few hours into smaller chunks that might only take you a few minutes to do. This avoids pushing the start of the action into the future and maybe never gets started.

Randy Pausch has also written a book about his Time Management Lecture.

Work: I am looking after the development of a few thousand leaders and employees with a very diversified cultural background stretching over 14 hours time zone.  Life: I have two little kids and my wife is working as a system engineer.

Over the past years I have aquired many new skills and best practices to be more effective. I use speed-reading, speed writing, speed leading and also the process from David Allen – Getting things done – The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and Six Sigma.


And now I am starting to use the latest powers of Web 2.0 to get one more step ahead in designing the ultimate work-life balance.
It was last Sunday when I came about iGoogle. And there it was the ultimate environment to get my whole life and work organized in an instant.
So what has changed since then ?
I have setup two iGoogle accounts – one is for work and the other one for life.

Whenever I am at work I go to my iGoogle work account. There I have a number of gadgets that do some fancy stuff for me. I get the latest leadership quote of the day, the stock price of the company I work for, the latest news through Google Reader about my employer, all the news about Management, Leadership, Talent Management, Employee Development, Career Development and Human Resources and the weather forecast. I have also added Google Bookmarks and the be Twittered Gadget where I see the latest twitter for example from New York Times.
What is the result of this iGoogle for work ? Well, it takes me just 5 minutes and I have the latest update on my company and on my profession.
What other gadgets should I add ? Please leave your suggestions in the comment section below. Thank you.

Twice a day I will log into my iGoogle for Life.  There I can leave a note for my wife or vice versa, see where it is raining or snowing (radar) right now, the receipe of the day or I can search for one, the latest discount offers, another to do list, the snow report of our favourite ski resort, time table search for the public transport, what is on teli tonight, what are the latest movies released, send a free sms, MSN Messenger, News (Menshealth, automotor, etc.), Telephone Book search, Route Search, Translator and search on eBay.
What other gadgets should I add ? Please leave your suggestions in the comment section below. Thank you.

New: The Road To Financial Armageddon Series
Another interesting story about transformation. This time it is about personal cashflow management. How Trent Hamm managed to turn the looming bankruptcy of his family around and turn it into a sustainable financial success. Cashflow Management is key for any successful sustainable endeavour.

1) Web 2.0 in HCM
What it will do for Human Resources HR function ?

2) My prediction for 2008 – groupware is so cool
Why 2008 will be the year of web based groupware ?

3) Personal Learning Environments
What is are personal Learning Environments and what are their benefits ?

4) All about conferencing
What conference tools are around and what are their costs, etc ?

5) Personal Learning Environment for language learning
What does a Personal Learning Environment for language learning looks like ?
Fanatastic, this is just what I was looking for. This shows the state of the art in learning, wow . It also lists a very interesting free collaborative environment for language learning called MyHappyPlanet.

6) Jobs and Careers in Social and Collaborative Learning
What are the future or emerging jobs in careers in social and collaborative learning ?

7) How to become  a professional blogger ?
This is a great post on professional development. I find this a very good description of how someone transitioned over years into professional blogging. A must read in my opinion.

The Ten Most Marketable Web Development Skills ?
What are the current marketable technical skills for a web developper ? This post was published in December 2007. For each technical skill the author listed links to relevant learning resources. Excellent!

9)e-Learning Reloaded: Top 50 Web 2.0 Tools for Info Junkies, Researchers & Students
How to collect all your notes, lists, links, etc. online for free ? How to get 5GB free storage space ? How to create free mindmaps and flowcharts collaboratively ? And many more interesting helpers….

10) How Tom Peters is using a wiki to collect real life management stories ?
Another example on how to collect collabaretively knowledge continuously for your
development.
You want to know about the management guru Tom Peters, check out his Blog.

11) 1000 True Fans
What does it take to build a sustainable living online ? Article by Kevin Kelly, founder executive editor of Wired News.
How this would translate into a winning strategy in making a living through teaching online is explored by Brian clark in his article: A 20-Step Process For Finding Your 1,000 True Fans.

12) Doing Business in Second Life (A Virtual World)
How people make a real living in a virtual environment ? These are one of these emerging jobs that did not exist just a couple of years ago.

New: Doing Business in Second Life (A Virtual World)
How people make a real living in a virtual environment ? These are one of these emerging jobs that did not exist just a couple of years ago.

1) Web 2.0 in HCM
What it will do for Human Resources HR function ?

2) My prediction for 2008 – groupware is so cool
Why 2008 will be the year of web based groupware ?

3) Personal Learning Environments
What is are personal Learning Environments and what are their benefits ?

4) All about conferencing
What conference tools are around and what are their costs, etc ?

5) Personal Learning Environment for language learning
What does a Personal Learning Environment for language learning looks like ?
Fanatastic, this is just what I was looking for. This shows the state of the art in learning, wow . It also lists a very interesting free collaborative environment for language learning called MyHappyPlanet.

6) Jobs and Careers in Social and Collaborative Learning
What are the future or emerging jobs in careers in social and collaborative learning ?

7) How to become  a professional blogger ?
This is a great post on professional development. I find this a very good description of how someone transitioned over years into professional blogging. A must read in my opinion.

The Ten Most Marketable Web Development Skills ?
What are the current marketable technical skills for a web developper ? This post was published in December 2007. For each technical skill the author listed links to relevant learning resources. Excellent!

9)e-Learning Reloaded: Top 50 Web 2.0 Tools for Info Junkies, Researchers & Students
How to collect all your notes, lists, links, etc. online for free ? How to get 1GB free storage space ? How to create free mindmaps and flowcharts collaboratively ? And many more interesting helpers….

10) How Tom Peters is using a wiki to collect real life management stories ?
Another example on how to collect collabaretively knowledge continuously for your
development.
You want to know about the management guru Tom Peters, check out his Blog.

11) 1000 True Fans
What does it take to build a sustainable living online ? Article by Kevin Kelly, founder executive editor of Wired News.
How this would translate into a winning strategy in making a living through teaching online is explored by Brian clark in his article: A 20-Step Process For Finding Your 1,000 True Fans.

I often recieve the question where I found my current job.
There are plenty of sites for Switzerland but this one really did it for me.
DirectJobs. 
Today 23060 Employers who offer in total 28011 jobs are covered.
You can test the site for 5 days. And you be surprised depending on your profile
and the search term you use how many potential opportunities are there.

4 Times a year Monster.ch and the University of Zurich and Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz publish the jobpilot-index. The jobpilot-index measures the number of offers on the main job-search sites in Switzerland and on 1000 company websites.
The following websites are included:
jobs.ch
jobscout24.ch
jobup.ch
jobwinner.ch
monster.ch
stellen.ch
jobclick.ch
telejob.ch
topjobs.ch

For management jobs a very good search engine is Alpha – The online executive market.
 

I have created a wiki around developmental assignments.

Developmental Assignments 2.0 

This is one of my favorite topic in development. Seminars, books, self study are not as effective as doing it, trying it out, putting it into action. Developmental assignments are the best way to leverage your development. 

There are plenty of possibilities to choose a developmental assignment for inside or outside of your job or while you are in between jobs. This book lists quite a number of assignments: McCauley, C., Developmental Assignment, ISBN: 1-882197-91-7 

Nowadays a lot of great assignments can be found on the internet. My intention is to collect them here. In order to better group these assignments I have chosen to list them against the MBA Core Curricula’s. I think this offer as good way to identify an assignments that would develop you further in the respective area.Another way to list assignments is against global competencies. Whilst this is an interesting way to structure development assignments yet these competencies vary from company to company.I took this MBA Core Curricula’s from the book “What the best MBAs know”, Edited by Peter Navarro, McGraw Hill 2005, Page 7

I would be happy to receive any suggestions around assignments in the commentary box. Thank you very much for your support in advance.

The list will be continuously updated. 

1. The Strategic and Tactical MBA
1.1 Management Strategy
1) An Archive of successful and failed business plans. (Business Plan Archive)
2) Vote on the best business plan. Get an eye for the winning plan. Another contest where one can vote.
3) Evaluate Business Models or submit your own. Click here to go to the site Ideawicket.
4) Web 2.0: “The next step is to start a planning process with a comprehensive map of your innovation ecosystem that positions your value creation and assesses the interdependencies that will determine the flow of benefits and your ability to capture a share of them. this is not a traditional competitive landscape or value-chain analysis but an analysis of the participants creating knowledge pertinent to your existing and future buiness. While this includes business partners and competitiors, it extends to academia, public research institutes, think tanks, creative communities or communities of practice, and contract research organizations. The map needs to be global and cover all relevant disciplines that intersect with your strategy.”Tapscott,Don; Williams Anthony D.: Wikinomics, Atlantic Books, 2007, Page 277 f.

1.2 Macroeconomics
1) Manage a virtual fund on Marketocracy. More about Maretocracy in wikipedia.It has several benefits to run a fund or participate in a club. It let’s you wear an investor’s head for some time and you need to take the macroeconomical situation into account. This is an interesting assignment for future leaders who will be involved in investor relations or who are going to run a business. 

2. The MBA Toolbox
2.1. Quantative Analysis (Statistics, Decision Analysis, and Modeling) 

2.2 Managerial Economics 

3. The Functional MBA
3.1 Operations Management 
3.2 Marketing
3.2.1 Public Relations
1) Be an editor on the community Digg. More about Digg in wikipedia. An opportunity to see what news in a democratic editorial environment makes it to the top.
2) A longer term assignment is to create your own blog and attract readers to your blog. 3) Colloborative Product Development and Design. CrowdSpirit.
4) A Rapid Prototyping Platform. Create an idea and sell it. Ponoko. 

3.3 Financial Accounting 

3.4 Managerial Accounting 

3.5 Corporate Finance 

3.6 Information Technology
1) Participate in a crowdsourcing project. Cambrian House. This one is IT related. 
2) Create a mashup. Paul Rademacher (Picture) created the mashup housingmaps. This got him later a job with Google.

4. The Organizational and Leadership MBA
4.1 Organizational Behavior and Leadership
1) Build your own community. Ning is platform where you can create your own social network. More about Ning in wikipedia.
2) Online Brainstorming. Brainreactions.
3)  Participate in a crowdsourcing project where you take the lead or support the leader. 

4.2 Human Resources Management
4.2.1 Learning & Development
1) Deliver Online Training. If there are no opportunities at your current company the option is to teach via the online learning community WiZiQ. You will also need to understand the technology in order to deliver your training. It prepares you to deliver your message to virtual teams and or give virtual presentations or trainings.
2) Career Planning or Planning your Development. The first step is self assessment.Here you find links to free Self-Assessment tools. (for example Myers-Briggs Personality type test) 
3) Leadership Development: “The starting point for any mager is personal use of the new collaborative technologies, preferably in conjunction with a Net Generation youngster. Ask your college student son or daughter to show you Facebook. Join MySpace. Edit a page in Wikipedia. Create a video clip for YouTube. Get a taste for how these open communities work.” Tapscott,Don; Williams Anthony D.: Wikinomics, Atlantic Books, 2007, Page 277.

5. The Political and Regulatory MBA
5.1 Business and Government 

5.2 Corporate Ethics Still verifying:

Second Life. This online game offers interesting opportunities to develop a number of the areas. One could be marketing, but I have not yet looked at it.

I looking for to list other successful collaborative assignments/projects here:
1) www.katarinalist.net is one of my favourite examples. Tapscott,Don; Williams Anthony D.: Wikinomics, Atlantic Books, 2007, Page 185 ff.

Watkins, Michael: The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, Harvard Business School Press, Sept. 2003 

This is one of the books I need to recommend to anyone who is about to get a new job. And even as this book is targeted to leaders I would recommend it to anyone starting a new job.

One of the main mistakes new joiners can make is to focus too much on learning the business than learning about the organization.

In my personal experiences it is the first 90 days that build the foundation for each personal successful development and therefore good preparation is key.

More on this book please click here. This is the author’s blog.

List of quotes from the book:

“You can do a lot to compensate for your vulnerabilities. Three basic tools are self-discipline, team building, and advice and counsel.” Page 27

“Acceleration Checklist:
1. What has made you successful so far in your career ? Can you succeed in your new position by relying solely on those strengths ? If not, what are the critical skills you need to develop ?
2. Are there aspects of your new job that are critical to success but that you prefer not to focus on ? Why is that the case ? How will you compensate for your potential blind spots ?
3. What do you need to do to ensure that you make the mental leap into the new position ? From whom might you seek advice and cousel on this ? What other activities might help you do this ?” Page 31 f.

“Effective learning calls for figuring out what you need to learn so you can focus your efforts. Devote some time to defining your learning agenda as early as possible, and return to it periodically to refine and supplement it. Efficient learning means identifying the best available sources of insight and then figuring out how to extract maximum insight with the least possible outlay of your precious time.” Page 37

What are the five essential questions to ask in a new organization ?
“1. What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing (or will face) in the near future ?
2. Why is the organization facing (or going to face) these challenges ?
3. What are most promising unexploited opportunities for growth ?
4. What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential of these opportunities ?
5. If you were me, what would you focus attention on ?” Page 46 f.

“How people answer can also tell you a lot about your new team its politics. Who answers directly and who is evasive or prone to going on tangents ? Who takes responsibility and who points fingers ? Who has a broad view of the business and who seems stuck in a silo ?” Page 47

When should your learning have the primary focus ?
“…learning should be a primary focus of your plan for your first 30 days on the job.”

Employability is the capability to stay employed or finding a new employement.

Your Experiences, Knowledge, Skills, Behaviours and Attitudes will influence your employability.

What are the Best Practices to maintain your employability as you go through your life ?
1. Employability is a Continuous Excercise
Employability is similar to staying fit. You need to excercise continuously. Too often I see people stopping this excercise as they grow in their career or reach a certain age. Yes it is an effort and it is the same as with excercising. Every time you need to overcome your inner resistance.

2. Experience matters – Overreliance on Titles and Certificates
Continuously look for challenges inside and outside of work, during your time of job search or while you study or even when you are retired.
Experience matters most. It is a powerful statement about yourself if you can say that you did this and such thing and had this and such successful outcome or this and such lessons learned.
Example: Someone would work in R&D and in his or her spare time would start a blog. How powerful would it be if this person could say at one point that by using marketing techniques she or he was able to increase the number of readers. This will show that this person demonstrated capabilities outside of his or her domain of expertise.

3. Use the Power of Developmental Assignments – stop looking for the easy way
A lot of research has been done on development assignments. These assignments are key when increasing your employability. By planning these activities well you can broaden your experience base across functions and businesses and demonstrate capabilities that are currently not fully utilized in your current development path.
I recommend you to read the book:
McCauly, Cynthia D.: Developmental Assignments – Creating Learning Expriences without Changing Jobs, Center for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, North Carolina

4. Web2.0 – don’t miss it
Get yourself an insight in Web2.0 and what it can do for your area of expertise. Example: I myself as I am in Human Resources Development monitor regularly what Web2.0 could potentially change in the domain of Employee Development.

5. Networking face to face
The older you get the more you should put away time for networking. Toastmasters is for example an ideal place for networking and you improve your leadership and presentations skills at the same time

6. Social Networking via Web
Create yourself a compelling presence in Linkedin, Xing or Facebook. Additionally use your blog to list your experiences and successes and participate in relevant user forums and discussion groups.

7. Improve Your Communication Skills
Never give up on improving your communication skills. Besides Presentation Skills (toastmasters for example) take a negotiation skills training, join a debate club or particpate in politics. Read up on Listening Skills, writing skills or anything else you find on communication skills in the web. Communication is the same as learning a language. You need to practice continuously. If you do not practice your skill level same like with languages will eventually decrease over time.

8. Business Skills 
Any organisation profit or non-profit is a complex system with many processes in place.
The more you have an overview of an organisation the more your learn about organisations the more easier you can navigate your development path.
I recommend you to read the book to get you a good up to date overview:
Navarro, Peter: What the Best MBAs Know, McGraw-Hill, 2005 or visit
www.peternavarro.com