First, I must review my progress on last year’s resolution…
Last year I set a goal of “exercising each Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 AM for 30 minutes.” I knew I had to make some changes in my routine to improve my health and I did it! In my physical examination at the end of the year, I showed huge improvements and I managed to reduce the rates I was paying for life insurance. That was real return on investment (ROI) from my efforts!
How did you do on your goals? If you did well, congratulations! If you didn’t, don’t beat yourself up. Just look forward and set more realistic goals for this year.
Moving forward this year…
Our physical health and financial health are both very important and always need monitoring, but this year I will focus on another important area: continual education. A line from the ASQ A&D Division Chair, Ryan Nowosielski, in a recent newsletter resonated with me. He mentioned an interesting statistic: the average shelf life of technical knowledge in the A&D industry is 10 years. Only 3 percent of what you know today will be relevant in 10 years.
I never thought of it that way. It puts a different spin on the need for continual education. Continual education has become a must in today’s work environment and I believe that this fact will also change how we will view 4-6 year college degrees in the future. It will become more important in your résumé to show that you are a continual learner. It will not be enough to show that you achieved a degree years ago, if you can’t show that you have also been renewing your skills; either through on-the-job training on new skills and technologies, or through complementary education programs. Perhaps trade schools, colleges and universities will look to offer “education maintenance programs” as a subscription service in the future. We will also see corporations elevating the importance of their internal training programs to keep their employees’ skills up-to-date.
Further evidence of the knowledge shelf-life is the skills gap found in the unemployed workforce. Even though we have a huge pool of unemployed people we still have problems finding specific skills required for current jobs in job candidates. The capability to learn and keep up-to-date will become a more important job skill for candidates than any specific single degree.
Join me this year and let us make a resolution to learn one or two new skills. Perhaps there are a few areas of improvement in the company that we can lobby for, and in the process of helping the company, we can also pick up some new skills. We can spend some extra time this year to research a topic, read a book, learn a new software feature, take a class or get a new certification. My goal this year is to continue to expand my knowledge areas and refresh some areas that might need to be updated. Wish me luck and I wish you luck with your endeavors.
Happy New Year!
An interesting related article with good thoughts for employers on hiring talent:
http://www.tlnt.com/2012/04/03/5-ways-the-new-war-for-talent-will-change-the-workplace-forever/
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