A Learning Journey

Overview

Now retired I can look back on my education and career through a series of successes and failures and my relationship with learning after a very indifferent schooling. Starting with adult education through to putting the OU MBA program at the centre of my career development. It was quite a journey.

Also to note I refer to education not training. Education allows us to think, make decisions and create new ideas, training doesn’t. I’m not saying training is bad but it’s different. Learning to drive, operate machinery and so on, are all training when it’s important that we do things consistently. However for our own personal development and growth it has to be education, as we are all different and need to develop the freedom to think and argue and challenge ourselves that meet out individual different needs.

As an example;

During my career I lived and worked in Russia where I took over a team in a place call Nizhny Novgorod many years ago. During a team teaching session with my new team (all Russians with excellent spoken English) I found that whatever I said they nodded and agreed with to the point where I wondered if they really did understand me. So, I teased them a bit with a couple of idiotic management speak statements again receiving the same positive acknowledgements. As a result I stopped the introduction and advised them that as far as I was concerned and the company I and they worked for (it was West Coast Californian company) it was ok to challenge and argue with me. I stated that in many cases I didn’t understand their country, their culture or their customers for that matter so I needed their challenges to educate me on how to progress the business. They caught on quickly.

A reason to learn

I’m a product of the 1960s secondary school system, (pre comprehensive) as an “11 Plus” failure I didn’t get to grammar school. I wasn’t a quick learner nor was I an accomplished academic and I saw no reason to learn. As far as I was concerned I was going to work on one of the local farms or be a garage mechanic, I like mechanical things. Then came my last year at the secondary modern school and reality began to take hold. With at best indifferent results from my schooling came limited local career options and the options I had been considering weren’t available.

However the RAF in the late ‘60’s were pushing apprenticeship schemes that looked interesting, but then did I have the right qualifications? Doubtful. Fortunately the RAF were desperate for apprentices so I got in, just. I was keen and very interested in the work learning how to repair the RAFs aircraft but needed the theory if I was to progress, finally realising that an education had a purpose and I needed to learn. I also realised I didn’t really know how to learn, or at least I hadn’t found my learning style.

Learning how to learn

As an apprentice with the RAF there were a variety of skills to be learnt, from the pure military through to technical practice and academic theory, science, maths, physics and so on. I noticed that it was the practical elements that interested me most and that I was getting good results, so I’m a practical sort of person easily picking up techniques and practices. In the class room though I was being far less successful, I struggled to find any level of interest and subsequently failed. I had done enough to stay in the RAF but not enough to qualify as an engineer. As a result I started my RAF career as an aircraft mechanic.

Still determined to make progress I thought I would finish my schooling and did evening classes taking O levels in Maths, Physics, Electronics, General Science, English language and so on. To my surprise I not only enjoyed the classes but was successful in passing and with more than the basic pass mark. Certainly maturity was a factor providing me with a state of mind that motivated me to learn but I also had developed an interest and of course a need to learn.

So why was this easier than previous class room based learning? Was it the quality of teaching or the style, the other students, the environment, the need? On reflection it was all of them as there was interest and healthy competition within the class room as well as challenge from the tutor and essentially it was fun.

Seems education is a two way street, we can’t just sit there and expect to be educated by absorption. It is a participation activity and the more we participate the more we progress. This attitude to learning progresses throughout my time with the RAF getting to an HNC in electronic engineering where, during my studies at the local college I met what was probably the best teacher I have ever experienced. He had a doctorate in Maths and managed to teach me to a level beyond anything I thought I could manage, getting into calculous, “J” notation and so on, square root of -1 what’s that all about?

Appling the learning

A combination of poor schooling and failed RAF apprenticeship to studying and passing O levels as a mature student set me into the right mind set. By the end of my time in the RAF I was studying part time at a local college for a HNC electronic engineering. This taught me a lot about me and how successful learning is possible, furthering career development and onto a career with a major IT corporation.

However, this growing knowledge was not going to get me very far if I couldn’t apply it. For a while I drifted backwards in my education as I couldn’t see where the my career and my education came together, a case of unconscious competence maybe. I was however successful in transitioning from military life to one in the private sector initially as a computer technician where the career opportunities were more open and available if you had the right attitude, skills and could market them appropriately.

What I had learnt to date was theoretical and although helping to achieve and sustain where I was, it wasn’t going to get me further up the ladder in a sustainable way. New skills were needed and school wasn’t the place to find them, at least not the sort of schools I knew about. There were more life and business skills, networking, presentation (both personal presentation and speaking), and business acumen (what sort of company I’m working for, their goals, competition, aspirations and so on). I needed to build knowledge and credibility as an individual and potential leader if I was going to go further.

I was making some progress, reaching a level of conscious incompetence that was difficult to sustain as I tried to make my way up and through the corporation. My progression wasn’t linear, it never is, meaning I was going sideways and backwards at times. I came to a realisation that something was missing, I had got myself into junior supervisory positions but I didn’t feel I was making it work. It became clear that I needed to learn the business language to both understand and communicate across the many disciplines such as marketing, finance, HR, sales, operations as well as engineering. Maths, science, English, even my HNC were all very well and necessary but I had reached a point where the phrase..” what got me here won’t get me there” came to mind, what was my next career goal? I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go. A symptom I suspect of a combination of lack of confidence in my ability whist coupled with a certain amount of complacency. I needed help.

I needed help with my Career Planning and development. Many people will either advise you that you need a career plan, they knew where they were going or that they were successful because they had a plan. Well that wasn’t me and I think for many of us although we may have had a plan at some point, life, opportunity, failure, circumstance, decision points and just plain luck shape our careers. Looking back at mine that was certainly the case. To take a look back at our careers and certainly mine, many of the jobs that I did just don’t exist anymore and the ones I moved into hadn’t existed previously. Take a look at your own careers and see if that is the case with you.

I was advised to find a mentor someone who could challenge me, my lack of confidence and complacency from time to time. The best mentors by the way are not the ones who tell us what to do but the ones who ask questions, lots of questions that make us think. It wasn’t long before I realised I needed more and different education and as such embarked on my MBA with the Open University. It had been a long time since I had done any real studying and learning, let alone taking exams so I was in for a shock ….. Spoiler alert, I failed the first course and had to re-sit the exam.

Realising what was learnt…

Sitting down to study again after so many years was indeed a shock. As well as having a young family and a full time job and indeed it was full time as I was in another junior management position in a customer facing role and struggling to make sense of it. Clearly working longer and harder wasn’t the right answer, I know it’s a cliché, but I needed to be working smarter, but what does that mean? Time to get educated on why and how some people make this work look easier than I was finding it, time to start my management studies.

Choosing the Open University was an obvious decision as it suited my life style and work patterns. However distance learning was a new experience, distance from fellow students, distance from my tutor and distance from the competitive motivation I needed. The first course of the MBA (certificate) was a full 12 months as I had to start from the bottom having no degree or qualifying business qualification, I had to successfully complete this to get onto the MBA programme.

I really had to start from the beginning to learn about management and also how to sit exams. As I mentioned I failed at the first attempt due to underestimating the exam process and lack of preparation. I resat a few months later and thankfully passed. It was a gruelling experience getting back into the habit of study, learning how to retain information and how to prepare and approach the final exam…. but the elation at passing was terrific. It was at the same time fascinating, opening up a whole new vision and language of management. New formulas, new theories, new perspectives, new realisations and a great deal of new knowledge. I was hooked and ready for the next course …. Bring it on!

It was a strange experience, I found the subsequent Diploma and MBA courses enlightening and revealing as well as continuing to be a gruelling grind of study as I slogged through them, but as I worked through I began utilising the techniques and language. I found that people around me were taking notice and were more prepared to listen to my points of view. It wasn’t so much that I was studying for an MBA but that I was using the right terms and through having a better understand I could ask better questions in a more intelligent way, ultimately building credibility. I was also becoming more confident in the work I was doing and the studying I was still ploughing through. The realisation hit me that what I was learning I was, in many cases, unconsciously putting into practice and it was having an effect, even before I had completed the MBA.

As a point of interest there was a theme running through the MBA I was studying for termed being a “reflective practitioner”. I found myself then and even now taking time to think through what needed to be done before moving forward. One of our tutors was a practitioner of Tai Chi that he strongly recommended to help clear the mind and solve problems. Personally I found going for a walk helped a lot but however we go about it we will never solve problems sat at our desk or walking around with ear pieces in, too many distractions, we need space and time to let our thoughts get to work. The more we do it the better we get at it.

Pass on what was learnt

As I progressed in my career and chosen profession I never got to the point where I thought, that’s it I now know everything, more alarmingly I found the more I learnt and understood the more there was to learn and understand, like looking through a telescope, the further you can see the more there is to take in.

I also wanted to pass on what I had learnt so signed up to be an instructor as part of my management role within the corporation. More learning to prepare for delivering management and employee courses but I was getting used to it by then. It was after delivering a few of these courses that I realised that teaching is a great way, in fact the best way of learning, obvious when thought about as we have to really understand the subject to be able to communicate and teach it properly. Students have an annoying habit of finding the really awkward questions.

I also had the most extraordinary and satisfying moments when mentoring and teaching, I gave one example at the beginning of this article and I will outline another below.

I was in a one to one meeting with a team member to discuss development, progress, aspirations etc. and I ask him how he thought he was doing. He had been quite down hearted and quiet throughout the discussion. So I came to the point and asked him what he felt was wrong. He said that he didn’t feel he was learning enough and didn’t have enough technical knowledge to be of any real benefit. So I thought about this for a few moments, closed my note book and looked straight at him and asked him to start telling me what he did know. This had the effect of opening the flood gates, he poured out reams of technical information about his business area taking to the white board to illustrate, highlight and explain further, some of it I understood, most I didn’t but that wasn’t important. What was important was that once he had started sharing what he had it freed up his mind and helped him realise what he did know, it cheered him and me up no end.

Conclusion

Here is another cliché, learning is a journey and it isn’t linear or one directional. We never really know what we have learnt until we are put into a position where we have to drag it out of our minds to solve a problem. We never stop learning and time to be concerned is when we think we know everything about a particular topic and are feeling confident.

Take time to reflect, don’t be afraid to ask for help, every good successful senior leader I ever met had a mentor to help them, I believe even the likes of Steve Jobs had a mentor.

Studying and learning on their own are only part of the answer to developing a career, it’s about realising and applying what was learnt and opening our minds to what comes next then sharing what we know, best done though asking questions and not providing answers.

Oh yes, I did pass my MBA, eventually.