Believe it or not, the phase in your life when you stop learning, a major part of you stops living. Alvin Toffler, an American writer and businessman with a futurist disposition known for his significant contribution towards digital and communication revolution, once said:
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Some of the world’s smartest and busiest people are known to have spare time each day for learning. This list contains formidable names such as Barack Obama, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and many others. These people have been unflinching in their resolve to find at least one hour each day to read and learn, while most of us cut and run with the excuse of our busy schedule.
Intellectual Capital is Greater than Financial Capital
Earning without learning is a waste of one’s intellectual capabilities. People who say that they do not have the time to learn are the ones busy collecting, spending and worrying about money. They are devoted fervently in earning money, and overlook the importance of learning to up-skill themselves in a competitive market. In these times of innovation and disruption, knowledge has become the new currency, and this fact is summed up best by the following quote by Benjamin Franklin:
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
This quote has stood the test of time and its essence is most conspicuous in today’s Industry 4.0 era marked with tremendous digital transformation.
There are things that money cannot buy, but knowledge can. And these are the things that actually matter at the end of the day. What are they?
- Valuable relationships with people from different walks of life.
- Better cognitive abilities to reason and perceive.
- Quick and better approach towards achievement of goals.
- Better communication skills with an expanded vocabulary.
- Ability to think bigger and better.
- Ability to learn from other people’s experience and wisdom.
Acclaimed futurist Peter Diamandis has coined the term “rapid demonetization” which signifies that the products and services that were quite expensive once are now being rendered at extremely reasonable costs or even free. This is all courtesy of the technology innovation. For instance, a video conferencing application when launched in 1982 was about $250,000. Today it is a free application. There are several such examples: video camera, video player, digital voice recorder, digital watch, and so on. Applications and services are becoming demonetized with time, while knowledge is gaining significant value.
The Power of a Trained & Educated Mind
A trained and educated mind is the most powerful entity known to mankind.
Between the years 2000 and 2010, most of the blue-collar workers in the manufacturing sector lost their jobs to robots that replaced about 85% manufacturing jobs. Industry 4.0 and the new wave of automation and data exchange with the help of cyber-physical systems, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), and cognitive computing has created a new “at-risk” crowd. This crowd comprises of people who work very hard but do not take out the time to learn in the course of their careers. They remain stuck at the bottom of the global competition and are always at the risk of losing their jobs.
On the other hand, there is another group that identifies the skills needed for the future and strives to learn them. They tread up on the ladder of global competition and are blessed with rewarding careers and remunerations. Technologies like AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning will create more jobs than it will eliminate. The problem, therefore, is not the lack of jobs in future, but the lack of people with the right skills and knowledge.
What Training Providers Must Strive to Provide?
Learning is an age-old ritual that one must perform like a devoted priest.
To make this ritual effective, training providers must strive to make learning more accessible, customized and interesting. They must be ready to utilize cutting-edge technologies into their training deliverables. No two individuals are the same when it comes to learning and so, blending trends and strategies into the training deliverables—such classroom training, online training, and self-paced training—will make the whole learning process more efficient and effective.
Designing the training deliverable based on the requirements of the candidates will provide specificity to the training material and the candidates will be more likely to opt for a course and complete it successfully. At the end of the day, a training provider must add value to an individual’s efforts, whether a student or a professional from the corporate workforce, who takes out the time from his or her busy schedule to learn something significant.
Cognixia is an e-learning and digital transformation preceptor with a wide-range of courses on emerging technologies for students, individuals, and corporate workforce. We strive to offer the best training deliverables inculcating best practices, with industry experts as instructors and state-of-the-art infrastructure to make the whole learning process successful. To an assertive mind firm on learning, we give our best to productively educating.
~ Sunny Shah