Accelerating Your Learning through Organized Training

Ongoing learning has become a cornerstone value of many companies throughout the world. An ongoing learning program — whether it’s sponsored by a company or fulfilled by an individual employee — offers opportunities for employees to grow in professional and personal settings while contributing their new skill sets to the growth of the company overall.

This extraordinary concept has gone on to reinforce a core idea of management and leadership: When you invest in your people, they will invest back into your company.

But there are a few issues that companies and employees may both encounter in ongoing learning endeavors. Namely, they discover that at some point, they may not have the time to commit to ongoing learning, or they may even feel that they’ve run out of opportunities.

This is why organized training is essential to the success of an ongoing learning initiative.

In this blog, we’ll discuss how organized training can help accelerate your learning, whether you’re learning how to do it for yourself or your company.

 

Commit the Time

First, we’ll discuss the most important part of training and ongoing learning — time.

Time plays an enormous role in training because there are very few ways to learn a new skill quickly.

Learning valuable skills requires education on the concepts of that skill, understanding the methods of success that play into the skill, and practicing the skill itself.

Overall, if you’re looking to keep training in your profession, you’ll need to ensure you have a dedicated block of time that you can spend on training.

This is all too easy for individuals and companies to overlook. The benefits of education are not tangible, and they’re not always easy to track. As a result, goal-oriented individuals can easily become sidetracked by completing other tasks and tackling new initiatives that are easy to prove concrete success.

But training and learning are different. Training doesn’t always pay off tomorrow. It pays off next week, next month, next year, and even 10 years from now.

It’s rarely an issue of finding time, as well. Often, goal-driven organizations and professions have to make time to spend on ongoing learning.

This brings us to our second point of how you can organize your training to accelerate your learning.

 

Commit the Money

If you want to get a quality education in a skill, the chances are strong that you’ll have to pay for it — and you may have to pay a higher premium than you may want.

However, as we mentioned in the previous section, your learning and training are investments that you can make. Companies make this investment as well to ensure that whole teams, departments, or corporations are on the same level of information.

It may cost out of pocket — but like any good investment, it will payback.

On the individual level, investing in your ongoing education means that you’ll learn applicable skills that make you more valuable to your company than you were previously. In addition, your new skills will make you a more attractive hire to another corporation, if you find that your career moves you in such a direction.

On the corporate level, investing in employee education allows you to start seeing a return gradually over time. This return could be inefficiency, tool use, units of work done, and more. This is the major benefit of training on a corporate level — nearly every single part of a company can be taught to do something better, faster, and more effectively.

The key is investing the cash to make it happen.

 

Look for the Next Step

If you ask any highly successful individual about the keys to success, you’ll probably hear a variety of answers.

But you’ll probably hear most of them say, “I’m always looking for what’s next.”

As an individual and a company, it’s all too easy to become fixated on short-term tasks that return short-term results, especially if those short-term results are significant in terms of gains or payouts.

However, effective leaders and efficient employees keep an eye on the horizon for what’s coming in a week, month, quarter, or year.

Some leaders are so effective at this that they can see change coming decades in advance.

This is essential to creating a schedule or organized training calendar. Once you can identify a change that’s coming, you can prepare yourself to adapt to it well ahead of its arrival.

Others who don’t see the change will wind up struggling to adapt to circumstances that have already changed.

This gives a company and an individual an incredible advantage, whether it’s an opportunity to rise above a corporate rival or advance to the next level of one’s career.

In a sense, this may be the most important concept to take away from our list. If you can effectively look ahead and predict what’s coming, you’re well on your way to establishing an organized training regimen.

Your next steps are to work backward. If you know a change is coming, you can determine when you want to be ready for the change. That allows you to determine how long you’d like to spend on your training, along with the budget you’d like to invest in it.

Then, you’ve effectively scheduled out the time and money you want to allocate so you can meet this fresh challenge head-on with an organized training schedule.

 

Learn with Michael Management

At Michael Management, we help SAP professionals learn and train for the challenges that they face in their professional lives.

This is true for individual learners and also entire companies.

We do this because we understand that the world changes and SAP is an essential part of the world that adapts to those changes.

Whether you’re prepping for the future of your enterprise or getting ready for the next step in your career, Michael Management is the place where you can learn how to take the next steps with SAP in particular.