4 Steps to Staying Relevant at Work

CNBC reports that the future of work won’t be about college degrees, it will be about job skills. They write:

Rapid technological change, combined with rising education costs, have made our traditional higher-education system an increasingly anachronistic and risky path. The cost of a college education is so high now that we have reached a tipping point at which the debt incurred often isn’t outweighed by future earnings potential.

Yet too often, degrees are still thought of as lifelong stamps of professional competency. They tend to create a false sense of security, perpetuating the illusion that work — and the knowledge it requires — is static. It’s not.

In 2016, a World Economic Forum report found that “in many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialties did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate.”

If you’re not regularly improving — adding new skills and mastering the ones you have — you’re falling behind. Thankfully, Richard Feynman developed a simple technique for learning something new. Farnam Street summarizes it this way:

1. Choose a concept you want to learn about
2. Pretend you are teaching it to a student in grade 6
3. Identify gaps in your explanation; Go back to the source material, to better understand it.
4. Review and simplify (optional)

That’s it! It’s simple, but not easy. Breaking down a concept into words a child can understand proves to be surprisingly difficult. But when we achieve it, we can be sure that we’ve mastered the concept.

Read the whole article for a full, step-by-step guide to staying ahead of the learning curve and don’t let work pass you by!

Photo by Rachel.