In a world of ample opportunities, or say, in Perficient’s world there are many areas, we as an employee can contribute and grow. How can we get ourselves perform in such a varied environment which is running at a fast pace?

The answer to this is, by upskilling on the areas which can provide us an opportunity.

For an organization, there are various ways of helping employees in enhancing the skills. It starts with identifying the areas and providing training which can be through online teaching platforms or classroom sessions conducted by experts or self-learning. All these methods, focus on specific topics, explain the theory, conduct practical sessions, and have assignments to check effectiveness of a training and provide a certificate.

 

Learning

Such training programs are effective in getting a person to understand the “what” aspect of a subject, but it cannot connect us to the how and where-to-apply part of the knowledge.

For the how & where part, it’s very essential that an employee is connected more and more to the real-world scenarios.

Real world scenarios come from our customers.

These can be from any of the following:

Customer’s documented requirements which are the first stories of truth (but not the whole truth).
Understanding who are our customer’s clients or end users.
Observing the daily issues that the customer faces.
Understanding the kind of data, the customer deals with.
What we have been able to deliver solving a customer issue.
What we might have fallen short of in delivering.
How we performed automation around our deployment process.
How we have performed testing of features and auditing of our configuration items.

Many scenarios like the one’s mentioned above provide the real problem statements, and when we think of providing solutions for these, we get the real learning which gets imprinted in our neurons as an experience.

We might have had many sessions of training but applying the skill in resolving a customer’s pain point, provides the true learning. Individual learning contributes in a team learning, which grows into a group learning and eventually company learning. This is the learning that can be sold to customers.

 

Take Away

It’s essential that we focus on everyday learning from customer needs, work with our peers in aggregating the learning and help our younger team members, to pick a byte of this learning.

This will help us in making a difference at an organization level.

 

Effective Learning = Providing customer solutions = Happy Customers = Happy Learned Organization