You probably have a set routine at work—be that within a shared office or a coworking space—ticking tasks off your to-do list, networking with clients, and collaborating with coworkers. While it’s great to have a routine, it’s also essential that you don’t stagnate. Incorporating learning into your everyday routine at work can help.
Furthering your education regularly also offers many practical benefits, from allowing you to establish yourself as a thought leader and boosting your self-esteem. Ultimately, this can help you advance your career.
Read on to learn about the benefits of continued learning.
Knowledge Is Power
It might be a cliche—but most cliches hold for a good reason. When you’re on the job, whether it’s in a client meeting or a brainstorming session with your team, you want to be one of the most knowledgeable people in the room. Why?
This allows you to establish proven expertise, which will earn you respect from your peers. It’s also the path to greater recognition in the workplace and all the benefits that recognition can bring, from bonuses to raises, promotions, and more.
By learning every day, you will constantly have new information to contribute and ideas to provide. That doesn’t mean you have to take a Harvard seminar every morning! Listening to a podcast on the way to work, reading current events, and checking the latest industry updates on social media are a few easy ways that you can stay on top of things.
Combat Boredom
Let’s face it. Even if you love your job, you might find it getting stale if you’ve been doing it for a while. Boredom is the first step towards apathy. This is the last feeling you want to have when you think about your career that you’ve worked so hard to earn.
Learning something new is a great way to avoid this trip. You’ll feel constantly challenged and invigorated, especially if you learn new skills. Technology is continually evolving the face of all kinds of industries, from e-commerce to food delivery, so the odds are that yours is also being impacted in one way or another. Tap into that power.
By learning new skills, you can also achieve a sense of accomplishment. This can be exceptionally motivating and powerful, inspiring you to tackle new challenges more frequently. All of this adds up to greater confidence in the workplace—another thing that inspires others to follow your lead.
Boost Your Self Esteem
Of course, gaining confidence isn’t simply a matter of impressing other people with your natural leadership style. It’s ultimately about being satisfied with yourself and proud of the work you do. Learning new things, especially if you’re mastering new skills, can thus also boost your self-esteem. Run with it.
Make the most of this potential by challenging yourself. Pick a task or skill relevant to your field but that you don’t have much experience in. For example, if you’re a content writer and always write blog posts, you might be curious about social media. Why not give it a try?
The beauty of this kind of self-driven learning is that there’s absolutely no pressure or stress. You can learn on your terms, when, where, and how you want. You don’t have a teacher breathing down your neck or homework to turn in. This kind of personal agency can also boost self-esteem.
Continue to Be Relevant
Becoming “irrelevant” or “obsolete” is a fear many people have when they view the rapidly changing world around them. This can be especially true if you work in a field that’s been heavily impacted by technological changes, like sales or medicine.
The fact is that technology won’t make you irrelevant. Only you can make yourself irrelevant—by failing to further your learning and not keeping up with the times. The power is entirely in your hands to keep up with the latest trends, tools, and tricks of your trade.
Take medicine as an example. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many healthcare professionals started offering telehealth services, even if they had never done so before. For many, this likely required investing in new technology, learning about legislation regulating telehealth, and mastering video conferencing tools. But they did it! Adapting works in your favor.
Change Your Perspective
Learning something new is also a great way to gain a fresh perspective—on your work, the people around you, and the world at large. This can ultimately boost your intellectual curiosity and your creativity, encouraging more high-quality work at the office.
One way to open yourself up to new perspectives is to talk to people with a different perspective than yours. A discussion with another person is often one of the best learning tools you can access. Best of all, it’s free! You’ll never know what you might pick up in an everyday chat.
Be Prepared for the Unexpected
Finally, incorporating learning into your daily work routine will allow you to develop a more flexible, agile mindset. When you’re keeping up with the changing world, you’ll be less surprised when unexpected events occur and consequently, you’ll be better equipped to handle them.
You can also tailor your learning towards this end. Say you work in a field like public relations, for example, and you don’t know much about crisis communications (a branch of PR that’s all about addressing the unexpected “worst-case scenario” when it happens). You can take courses specifically on this topic to get the knowledge you need, so you are ready, just in case.
As you can see, making learning part of your daily work routine offers many benefits. Best of all, it’s pretty easy to acquire knowledge these days. Educational podcasts, blogs, digital publications, TV shows, documentaries, books, online learning platforms, webinars, YouTube channels—there are so many ways to learn.
You can also talk to your employer about the possibility of further learning programs. Some companies will provide training or sponsor attendance to seminars or conferences as a way of bolstering workers’ knowledge and skills.
You don’t have to gain admission to a fancy university and go back to school to expand your horizons. The tools are at your fingertips. The power is truly in your hands.