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Breaking Through Learning Obstacles: Pursue Second-Skilling to Promote Career Resiliency, with Barbara Oakley, Professor of Engineering, Oakland University, and Author, Mindshift
Sometimes we find ourselves in our careers sort of either stuck in a rut or beginning to wonder if we want to maybe try something different. And in the past we’ve always approached careers with this idea of a sort of a T-shaped approach. So we have one deep skill and a lot of sort of tangential side skills. So you might learn engineering and then on the side you might learn a little bit about public speaking or just how to type and things like that. But now we’re beginning to realize that it’s a good idea in your career to have a second skill, right. Something else that you’re working on as a backup to help you be more resilient in the face of the significant changes that are going on due to technology which is affecting careers of all sorts. And if you’re a doctor or a lawyer you’re not safe. This second approach to a career resiliency I call or actually this is after Patrick Atay who developed this idea in Singapore – it’s a pi-shaped approach. So you have two legs and then the crossbar on the pi. And this pi letter approach to learning or career development. It means having a second skill – having something else that’s a fallback or that complements what you already learned.
Let’s say that you are an engineer but let’s say that you like photography. So it’s a nice idea if you really like photography to build that as a second skill because you can find yourself perhaps doing videography which is really an important area today. Let’s say you work as a bank teller and you really like people. You can second skill in learning how to help other people, to counsel other people. And what’s interesting is there’s this whole incredible world of online learning available now that’s high quality that wasn’t even there five years ago. So whether you’re interested in learning to code or in medieval manuscripts you can find courses that will help enhance your skill set and help you to second skill.
If you are the leader of an organization I think it’s invaluable to promote the idea of second skilling. It will help make your employees be more resilient when things are changing. So whether or not what they’re learning in this particular instance whatever that instance is, they’re getting practice in learning. They’re sort of becoming more mentally flexible. And so that’s a really good attribute to have in your employees because change is going to be inevitable.