The FINANCIAL — There are two kinds of employees: those who learn because their boss or human resources department tells them to, and those who learn because they truly want to become better at their job, and get ahead in their career.
If you’re in the latter category, you are already ahead of most of your peers: you possess a love of learning and a sense of purpose. However, just a love of learning is not enough: you need to study the right things. Reading Thomas Aquinas all day is probably not going to get you anywhere, unless you intend to become a scholar of medieval philosophy and theology. Pointing to concrete skills that you can acquire that will help you get ahead in your work is hard, because every job is different, but I will nevertheless attempt to introduce you to some skills that will help you get ahead in almost any job. The three skills that I’ll discuss are writing, data analysis, and teaching.
Let’s start with the first one: writing. Being able to put your thoughts on paper in a structured way is extremely important in any organizational settings: not only will it help you convey information to others, or persuade them, it will also make you a better thinker. An argument or line of thinking that makes sense in your head, may look completely off when you put it on paper. A lot of writing you see every day is sloppy: it lacks structure, or is badly argued. Sometimes the wordsmith even uses superannuated language and utterly complex vocabulary to camouflage the fact that he or she doesn’t actually have very much substance to bring to the table.
Many people think of writing as putting their thoughts on paper. The problem with this approach is that your thoughts are rarely linear and structured: they are messy, jump from one thing to another, and can be hard for others to follow. Instead, before you start the actual writing of whatever you’re about to write, take a blank piece of paper, and put together an outline. Figure out what you are going to write in your intro, in each of your body paragraphs, and in your conclusion. This can be very brief: I usually use bullet points in my outlines. Then when you start writing, don’t start at the beginning, start at the end: write your conclusion first, so you know what you want the rest of your article to lead up to. After you’re done with your first draft, highlight the first and last sentence of each paragraph, and make sure that they actually convey the key message of that paragraph. Using these simple writing techniques will make your writing easier to understand and more structured.
Another skill that will help you get ahead is data analysis. In large corporations, this function is usually performed by specialized data scientists, who used it for a range of business purposes, for example to analyze customers’ shopping behavior and offer targeted advertising on the basis of that shopping behavior.
As described in a widely-read New York Times article last year, the American retailer Target analyzes the behavior of shoppers using customer loyalty cards and sends these customers discount coupons for specific products that the company thinks they might be interested in. For example, its statisticians found that certain types of seemingly unrelated products were usually bought by women in the early stages of their pregnancy. Thus, they were able to predict a with high level of accuracy that women who buy certain combinations of products are probably pregnant. The company then sent these women discount coupons for products like diapers and baby clothes. In one case, the company found out that a teenage girl was pregnant before her own father knew: the poor man lashed out at the company for sending his daughter coupons for these products, but later had to apologize when he found out the girl was in fact expecting a baby.
If you work in a big corporation that already uses data analysis, learning to speak the language of data will help you to build bridges across departments and to make your company more effective. If you work in a small- or medium-sized business that does not yet mine data for analytical purpose, this is a an opportunity for you to add real value to your business or to the company you work for. Think about the business decisions that your company makes, and how more data or knowledge about the data could improve that decision-making process. Then go out, collect the data, and analyze it. This doesn’t have to be complicated, and in fact many business already do it on a small scale. Especially retail businesses can be good at this. Does the data show that customers often buy two products together? A supermarket will often put them next to each other. Does the data show that more bread is sold on Tuesdays than on Wednesdays? Increase the inventory levels on Tuesday morning. Learn about data analysis, boost your career, and add real value to your business.
The third skill that is crucial for your career is teaching. I want you to become a teacher. You probably already are. Teaching doesn’t just happen in front of a classroom. In fact, in most classrooms, very little actual teaching takes place. Most teaching takes place during one-on-one interactions, when one employee tries to familiarize another employee with a certain skill or process. How often do we hear people complaining about others, saying “I told him five times, and he still doesn’t get it”? That is because telling someone something is not teaching them. We all know that I could listen to someone talk about painting for years, and still be a bad painter. Other workplace skills are no different: it takes a good teacher to manage the skill acquisition process.
Research different learning styles: people learn in different ways, and it is the teacher’s job to be able to deal with this. It is rare to find someone who speaks fluent English after being taught about English grammar for a decade. Instead, most good English speakers are those who’ve actually practiced speaking English.
Everyone can tell someone how to do something, but that doesn’t mean that they will actually learn that skill. However, once you realize that most people don’t acquire skills through being told how to do something, you are a halfway there. Teaching is hard, but if you know how to do it, you can greatly contribute to the development of your organization and of the potential of the people who are part of it.
Discussion about this post