CAREER DEVELOPMENT INSIGHT
Elaine Gibson MSc, ChFCIPPdip, MCMI, FHEA, CIPP education director, discusses what it means, her career, emphasising why learning is essential
W ould you consider yourself to be a lifelong learner or does ‘learning’ fill you with dread? If the latter, I would suggest you are thinking about learning in the wrong way. Lifelong learning does not mean that you must engage in formal education; instead, consider rather that your learning is the opportunity to take a journey where the destination expands as you decide where personally and professionally you wish to develop your horizon. A message I share with the learners I have been responsible for is that when they finally receive that hard-earned certificate, cementing a period of challenging study, this is in fact just the beginning for them as the real learning begins when they start to apply their learnt skills and knowledge to the workplace. I liken this to passing your driving test; yes, you can now drive but the experience comes when you are doing the task in hand. There are huge benefits to continuous learning. To put this into context, how many of you have had memory lapses, walked into a room and forgot what you
went in there for? A key point to note is that the human brain behaves like a muscle and like all muscles in our body it needs exercising. Brain cells change shape as we learn and cells that send and receive information become stronger. A study conducted by Merck Healthcare identified that individuals who spent significant amounts of time engaged in numerous activities and had to process a variety of information were 47% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than members of the group who did not. ...consider all the fantastic learning opportunities around you Take time to consider all the fantastic learning opportunities around you. Are you where you want to be professionally right now? Perhaps you have a future goal in mind: maybe to achieve a promotion, change career direction or be an
inspirational leader? Whilst you may have grand aspirations to develop and become a better version of yourself, if you stand still your goal will never happen. Life can get in the way; we have families, a demanding job and perhaps a boss who puts barriers in the way of progression; however, there is always a way forward: as the old saying goes ‘life is what you make it’. I speak as someone who has personally experienced such challenges and I share a brief account of my journey as a lifelong learner as an example of how I grasped the opportunities that were presented to me. I joined the world of work in 1980. There was a recession on, you could not get a mortgage and jobs were thin on the ground. I was lucky, as my introduction to the workplace came when my maths teacher recommended me for a role and I got it. At the age of sixteen I had not yet been introduced to the world of payroll – that gem was on the horizon. After settling down and starting a family I finally found my career direction, a passion. I was an accounts officer studying
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | September 2018 | Issue 43 14
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