People with strong learning skills assess new situations and challenges optimistically and dare to embrace change. Feeling in control of your work and prepared for changes in it has a demonstrated effect on effectiveness, cost-efficiency, motivation, and career well-being.
In this time of many changes, employees need to find their own recipe for renewing themselves again and again. This is no easy task: the amount of material to learn is growing, and choosing relevant content can feel laborious. Goal-oriented learning also always requires conscious effort. Even the best courses and literature do not automatically turn learning into competence until you can practice and apply your insights.
This article shares tips from the expert working group we brought together on creating a goal-oriented learning plan to support your professional development.
Clarifying what you want to learn first makes it easier to plan your learning journey. A learning plan guides not only planning but also reflection and monitoring, and, above all, breaks a large undertaking into meaningful, manageable parts.
A learning plan helps schedule skills development and reminds you what each learning activity aims to achieve. A good learning plan answers the questions: why, what, and how do I learn?
Below you will find our working group's guidance for planning your learning, along with a link to downloadable materials and templates to help create learning plans for yourself or your team members.
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The important skill of recognizing your competence
Moving between different roles and professions has become commonplace, as has continually articulating our skills. What can I actually do? By recognizing our competence, we make visible what we know and can do, and how that expertise can be used, applied, and developed.
A clear understanding of your skills helps you make informed decisions about your career and professional development: knowing your abilities helps you plan your career path, seek suitable roles, and direct your professional growth.
Recognizing and articulating competence is difficult even for many top professionals. Few people consider such complex questions in their daily lives!
Yet it is a skill everyone can practice by pausing to reflect on their expertise, learning to structure and articulate it, and talking about it aloud.
You can start exploring your competence through tests and assessments, reviewing past successes, analyzing feedback, and examining the skills acquired through hobbies, association activities, or other positions of responsibility.
Talking about your skills with others is a good way to clarify your thinking and articulate your competence. Explaining it to others clarifies it for you too. Describe previous work tasks / hobbies / roles as fully as possible to a friend or colleague, and ask them to help identify your expertise, skills, values, and strengths.
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Categorizing skills to help structure your expertise
After identifying your skills, dividing them into categories can help you articulate them. Grouping skills by theme makes your expertise more concrete and easier to analyze and discuss.
Make your skills and development needs concrete by identifying and classifying the skills required, using categories such as these:
Meta-skills are transferable, general working-life skills important to everyone. They help people succeed regardless of role or industry. Examples include communication and teamwork, problem-solving, and digital skills. Thinking and learning skills are also important meta-skills.
Subject-matter expertise refers to core skills associated with job content, industry specialization, and a profession. These include work-related quality and process expertise, for example.
Business skills help people better understand an organization's operating environment, goals, and business models.
Systems skills include financial and strategic expertise and networking skills, for example.
How does your expertise look now? Did examining it through these categories bring a fresh perspective to how you articulate it?
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Connecting skills needs to work and/or career goals
Your workplace's strategy and the skills development priorities derived from it provide useful guidelines for developing your competence. Consider which skills you need in everyday work to perform better, and how your work is changing.
Having a good reason to learn greatly strengthens motivation. Once you have made your skills development needs and preferences concrete, try to connect them to your work or career goals. Consider how this learning will benefit your learning goals or career aspirations.
You can also begin mapping the need and direction for your development by imagining the future of your work and considering how it will change.
Do you know how your tasks will change in the future and what skills this will require of you?
You can also talk with a colleague or partner. What changes in your industry and work do they highlight? Exchanging ideas with colleagues or your manager can be very helpful.
By now, you will have a whole range of interesting, personally relevant skill areas in mind. Next, try turning them into learning goals, for example using the four-quadrant framework or grid in the templates. You can also begin prioritizing as the order and timing of your identified learning areas become clearer along your learning path.
Clarifying goals also helps plan learning activities and methods: with clear goals in mind, you become better at noticing learning opportunities in your own environment.
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Connect your work and community to your learning goals using the 70-20-10 model
Once you know what you want to learn, the next step is choosing ways to support that learning. A widely used way to structure learning as a whole is the 70-20-10 model. In this model, learning consists of three mutually supporting components.
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70% of learning takes place through work: This is what is known as "learning on the job," through everyday tasks, challenges, projects, and problem-solving. This learning should not simply be incidental experience: it needs to be structured and purposeful. Employees should have opportunities to try new things and receive feedback that supports their development.
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20% of learning takes place through other people: This includes mentoring, informal peer support, and collaboration, where learners can share ideas and get advice from others. Organizations need to create structures that support this, for example by encouraging peer learning or using mentoring.
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10% of learning takes place through formal training: Formal training, such as courses and seminars, often involves more than an investment of time. This share of overall learning should therefore focus on acquiring and deepening knowledge and skills that would otherwise remain missing, through precisely targeted, goal-oriented learning. Which essential skills do we need that we cannot learn from one another or by doing our work?
With support from your work environment and workplace community, your learning plan can consist of many small elements that you shape using the 70-20-10 model to support your learning.
Even the best courses and literature do not automatically turn learning into competence until you can practice and apply your insights in line with the model.
Consider the most suitable and natural ways for you to advance your learning towards the goals you have defined.
You can proceed as follows.
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If you are taking a project management course, agree with your manager on an opportunity to practice leading projects in your work.
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If you are studying management on a university course, bring examples from your everyday work into your assignments.
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Discuss what you have learned and explore whether you could teach others too.
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Set up a peer discussion circle with other learners and share your learning in your workplace community.
Creating a learning plan
You can create your learning plan with pen and paper or electronically, for example in Excel or as a Padlet board. There is no single right way to make a plan, so feel free to make it your own. What matters is that you can easily find and edit it.
You have now formed a picture of what you want to learn and why, and considered suitable methods. The next step is to create a concrete learning plan by writing all this down, for example using the following template:
We have created guidance to help you develop a goal-oriented learning plan. You can download the instructions and templates here: https://www.kuulas.co/toolkit
The templates guide you through creating your learning plan using the stages presented in this blog. You can proceed in order or select the parts most useful to you.
Join the discussion on Kuulas's LinkedIn page and share your own tips!
Investing in learning is always worthwhile!
Wishing you the joy of learning on behalf of the whole working group,
Elina Pihlantie
Kuulas & Co
We coach, design, and facilitate changes in work and skills, helping build competitive advantage through learning. Join us on an inspiring learning journey, follow our account, and subscribe to our newsletter!
Working group: Elina Pihlantie, Suvi Halttu, Suvi Ferraz + Susanna Valkeus