Is Google not giving you the answer? How learning by doing will fast-track your career change
Picture this:
You’ve decided to spend some time on your career change. After a couple of hours, you’ve been through the jobs boards, read a series of articles… and feel just as stuck as you did at the start of the process.
Sounds relatable?
Choosing – and developing – a career is a learning process. You need to figure out what you enjoy, what you’re good at, and what you want to get out of your work. Most of all, you need to learn about the other types of work that are out there.
If you think about your daily life, you’re probably engaging with the same networks week on week. Your colleagues, friends, your football team, for example.
If you’re wanting to do something different, that’s likely to be outside of your current network. And although internet research is easy, it doesn't allow you to fully experience other worlds.
What that means in practice is getting outside your comfort zone, and having new experiences. Perhaps it’s going to a talk, a conference, or talking to someone about their career.
But how do you learn from that experience? Is it a case of just doing lots of different things, or can you approach your experimentation in a more structured way?
One approach thinking about how we learn from our experiences is David Kolb's experiential learning model. This recognises that we develop through our interactions in the world and the experiences that we have.
The model comprises four stages:
Concrete experience: Your immediate hands-on experience. This might be your job, an internship or volunteering. To take an example, volunteering on a nature conservation project.
Reflection: Reviewing the experience to analyse what you enjoyed, disliked and learned. This allows for a deeper understanding of your preferences and values. For example… “I really enjoyed the group camaraderie, but pulling up nettles was pretty boring.”
Conceptualisation: Interpreting the experience. You form new or more developed ideas and theories about what’s important to you in your work. “Teamwork is something that’s important to me, as well as being able to see the results of my work."
Active experimentation: Applying your new ideas to design new experiences. “Hmm, what else could I do which involves working in a team?”
The learning cycle is sometimes displayed as a spiral: each time we travel around it, we increase our knowledge.
Learners can enter the cycle at any stage. In our example above, we could have begun with the last stage by brainstorming opportunities for working in a team. However, as each stage is dependent on the last, you need to go all the way around the cycle for learning to happen. For example, if you miss out "conceptualising", you could carry out many experiments, but not take anything from those experiences. Instead, it's just done a random selection of things you did.
If you miss out “concrete experience” then you could end up stuck in “paralysis by analysis” – trying to think your way to a solution, without actually doing anything about it. That’s what generally happens when you disappear into a Google research hole.
That’s why undertaking experiences in the real world is such a powerful way of making change. By engaging with new environments, reflecting on what you’ve done, and then crafting new experiments you can create radical shifts in your thinking.
So what new experiments will you try this week?