Relationships and continuous training: the key to staying competitive

These percentages showed that it was more useful to teach learning than to teach something specific during courses (in-presence and online).

This approach should favour:

- the periodic definition of opportunities for confrontation (physical or remote) between people in the company

- the development of tools to optimise sharing

- the creation of a digital 'common house' where information can be drawn on and poured in to solve critical operational issues.

Jay Cross, a futurologist and father of the term 'e-learning', argued in the late 1990s that as much as 80 per cent of our knowledge was the result of informal, unstructured learning, pointing out that the vast majority of what we know we take on unconsciously, through relational or networking skills, what I call the mother of all soft skills.

Family, friends, cultural aggregations, social micro/macro-contexts, make up the baggage of ties and knowledge supporting our interaction with the external environment.

The ability to develop, manage and maintain this network will make the response to what is happening around us static or dynamic, as the complexity of the context requires responses that almost never find unambiguous translation in the basket of technical skills we have acquired in our training.

But this does not mean stopping formal learning, on the contrary.

In 2018, an update of the same paradigm carried out by a study by Training Industry Inc. proposed a new tripartition by conducting a survey among 960 employees in the USA and the result was: 55/25/20, with a marked increase in social and formal training.

Each company is different in terms of objectives, culture, approach but today, with the increasing, fast and conscious (?) digitisation, the percentages could change to 35/35/30 for those who do a lot of smartworking with reduced physical presence and many online courses or other combinations (60/30/10) if they invest less in courses and are back in presence.

Today, we find ourselves in what is called thelearning society, or knowledge society, where continuous learning of hard and soft skills is the basic condition for surviving within it, with respect to the constant changes that characterise it.

We have moved away from a system that focused only on technical (hard) skills, always necessary of course, and have progressively recognised the growing value of that set of knowledge (soft) capable not only of affecting the application of what we have learnt to do, but also of determining the development of new skills that help us survive in a world that changes too fast for how we have been trained, for hundreds of thousands of years, to learn.

By now, our network is a combination of what we know how to do, how willing we are to learn and how we maintain our relationships on a daily basis.

The more our network expands, the greater our adherence to the context.

One only has to look at the last twenty years to realise how radical the changes in our lives, habits, professions have been. The technological drive has become so propulsive that it is no longer possible to reason about forecasts in ten years, but in two/three. Often even less. Our responsiveness to the system ensures that we remain within it.

I agree with Sonya Friedman when she states in her book "Men are dessert" that: "Each of us is in control of three things: what we think, what we say and how we behave".

Some people sunbathe, some tan, some burn and some invent photovoltaic panels.

Let us also take this reference: the context tells me that the sun is very strong today. I may not react (I stay where I am), react conservatively (I take shelter under the shade of a plane tree), react aggressively (I take shelter, I inform myself, I study, I turn that initially hostile phenomenon into an advantage).

We have to learn to listen to what is happening beyond our shoes, we have to stay hooked on the system and people, stay tuned in and curious.

People represent unpredictable hubs of life and knowledge, from whose interaction previously unknown worlds can explode. The more connected we are, the more relevant we are, the higher our employability indices will remain.

Without continuous learning and neglecting the value of the relational network, we seriously risk falling behind, being obsolete, outdated.

We tell ourselves this every day. Our companies write it in their 'values', in their 'mission statement', we fill social media with posts where we write about the importance of 'putting people at the centre'. But then what do we do practically every day, apart from saying we don't have time? We run around like hamsters without protecting a vital slot in our diary to think about how to stay relevant.

So let's do a very simple thing: as soon as we finish reading the article, let's immediately open our online Calendar and block a 30' slot per day, replicating it every day without expiry date. Let's write in the calendar 'moment of reflection' and protect it at all costs to reflect, read, deepen, think, and broaden the knowledge we consider important to allow us to remain competitive.

We can no longer afford to 'just work'.

You don't want to do it? Think you don't have time? Guess who will pay the consequences?

*Networking Trainer & Community Builder