If you aspire to career growth, you can’t be complacent. Where you are today is a reflection of the education and skills that you brought to your current position. The question is, where do you want to be tomorrow? You won’t get there by coasting on what you already know.
The key to your future can be found in an ongoing commitment to learning, also known as professional training and development. By getting better at what you do and expanding the boundaries on what you understand, you become ever-more valuable to your team, customers, and company. In fact, you become a bigger player in your entire industry, which widens your world to new career opportunities as well.
Why is continual learning so important? Because the world is moving so fast now that people who stand still will be passed by. Knowing more than the next person has become a major competitive advantage in every industry. As Joyce A.E. Russell wrote in The Washington Post: “With today’s more complex business environment, learning is not just a nice thing to do—it is essential for staying on top of things...None of us can afford to remain stagnant in our knowledge.”
Yet despite these realities, many people feel stuck when it comes to increasing their professional knowledge base. They’re swamped at work, overwhelmed at home, and unclear on how they might manage to squeeze the extra hours needed out of their already full schedules to make time for additional learning.
The secret lies in realizing two things. First, with the easy accessibility of today’s technologies and mobile options, it’s no longer necessary to learn in a classroom—you can bring training tools with you wherever you go. Second, because you don’t need to carve out a big block of time to attend a live class in person anymore, you can approach learning on your own terms and in your own timeframe.
If you don’t have a solid hour to devote to picking up new skills, how about sparing 10 minutes? A couple of shorter stints composed of smaller time units can quickly add up—and mobile technologies make it almost a shame not to learn on the fly or between other activities.
Here are 12 painless ways to train on your own time—picked up from our own customers—that will help grease the wheels for your next big opportunity:
1. Pick Your Poison
No matter what industry you’re in, you can use online learning resources to learn on your own schedule. To get started on your professional development, you simply need to choose a platform and gain access to it. The point of a platform is to provide you with easily accessible training materials that allow you to learn a lot in small chunks of time. An online training library of courses can do this (we have a tech and creative training library at Pluralsight), and so can an online book service. Even popular blogs and podcasts can fulfill this function if they’re targeted at your line of work and you refer to them regularly.
2. Shift Gears on Your Breaks
How would you rather spend your work break: catching up on Facebook again, or doing something just as engaging that can help you land your next promotion? Take advantage of your breaks to watch a training video on your smartphone, iPad, or laptop. Devoting a 30-minute lunch break to learning a few times a week can quickly add up to hours of professional training a month, without needing to change your schedule. Even short breaks in the morning or later afternoon can offer enough time to pick up some new skills and ideas.
3. Hold a Brown-Bag
Since the whole team benefits when everyone knows more, consider organizing a regularly scheduled group brown-bag session with your colleagues. You can share courses from your own training library and watch them together, or let others take the lead on training topics on different days.
4. Capture Your Commute Time
Driving to work presents the perfect setting to absorb a podcast, audiobook, or other training tool that you can listen to while you commute. If you take a bus or train, you can add video to the experience, watching entire courses while you ride. If you travel an hour a day to your job and back, that’s potentially 10 hours a week of focused learning time.
5. Project it on the Big Screen
Why watch trash TV in the evening when you can use the same equipment to learn? Many online training courses can play through Xbox and Apple TV just as well as videogames can. So crack open a soda, turn up the surround sound, and enjoy the show on your big-screen TV as you get smarter all the while.
6. Carve Out Time on Weekends
While you don’t want to spend your whole weekend on work-related activities, finding moments here and there for professional growth can help break up the workweek while providing inspiration for Monday. Can you find an hour to learn a new technology online or listen to a podcast that can help you solve problems at the office?
7. Learn While the Cat’s Away
Weekends can be particularly effective times for learning when others in your household are out and about, and you have a quiet moment. Whether your spouse is traveling or your kids are at soccer practice, it’s the perfect opportunity to pull up your platform and dig into some educational material.
8. Park It
There’s no rule that says professional training must take place indoors—and with today’s technologies, there’s no need for it. Get a breath of fresh air and go to a park with your iPad or smartphone, and watch a course while sitting under a tree. Being out in nature will lift your spirits, and the course content will elevate your mind.
9. Travel Smarter
Travel time presents some of the best stretches to enhance your professional skillset. In addition to time during flights or train travel when you’re free from everyday interruptions, you may also be able to take advantage of evenings in the hotel and lulls between work events, where you can turn lost time into learning.
10. Maximize Parental Leave
While most people expect to fall behind at work during maternity or paternity leave, when approached differently, your leave can push you ahead. One of our customers in Sweden chose to watch dozens of Pluralsight courses relating to her business while recovering during her leave, and came back to work ahead of her peers.
11. Double-Dip During Downtime
Whether you’re home sick, waiting in line, or on the sidelines at a swim meet when your child isn’t swimming, you can recoup lost minutes or hours by pulling up your platform of choice on your mobile device. It’s the ultimate form of multi-tasking.
12. Bone Up at the Gym
Most any workout can lend itself to learning. It’s as easy to listen to the audio of a professional course while you run or bike outdoors as it is to listen to music. If you’re on the treadmill or stationary bike at the gym, you can prop up your iPad and watch a course or read on your Kindle while you exercise. With a waterproof smartphone case, you can even learn while you swim!
Accessibility has made everything possible when it comes to professional development. Learning platforms have evolved toward online options that transform wasted time into valuable opportunities.
If you make the most of mobile technology, you can take 10 minutes several times throughout the day for online learning as opposed to waiting to find the hour you think you need. Tomorrow’s best leaders will use the wide range of opportunities that come up in daily life to move their training, and their individual development, continuously forward.