If we’re honest, most of us get to the end of school and are so relieved to have escaped the grip of compulsory learning that we forget most of the good habits school instilled in us. Even as we move on to college, the focus that we bring to our learning is held up more than anything else by the fact that we’ve chosen the subject we’re studying, and by the time we’ve graduated, many of us are keen to put away the books and be done with the classroom.
It’s not until we’ve spent some time in the world of work that we become aware of just how important learning is, and that the phrase “never stop learning” is something more than just a folksy saying. Although it seems to get harder with every year to keep up with the learning process, the importance of ongoing education becomes clear when you look at technology. With the pace of change in our world, someone who graduated in the middle of the 2010s – and has been working since – will have seen significant changes in their job, and will have needed to stay alert to new information.
Do we stop learning at 25?
It’s commonly said that kids in school and young adults in college are primed to learn because their brains are still forming – and that after the age of 25 we lose a lot of the ability to learn. Some element of that is true – our brains do loose much of their plasticity and it becomes harder to form new neural pathways. It does not become impossible however, and the main way to ensure you can still form those pathways is to keep trying. In the business world, this can mean learning about new management techniques or software applications which will assist you in doing things more efficiently. Running online courses can help people learn through reinforcement, a method which becomes all the more important post-25.
Is it best to learn from experience, or in a formal setting?
In truth it is hard to say what the best method of learning is as you get older, and there is some evidence to suggest that the more different approaches you take, the better. Some workers favour a more autodidactic approach, while others will more readily associate a formal way of learning with greater success. For an employer, the take-home message is to research different ways to test and buy LanSchool software, while also recommending books and apps that can help more independent learners. If you think of the brain as being like the body, working out different areas requires different exercises, and education is no different.
You learn more than you realize just by paying attention
If you were to just stop doing something for a few weeks and then start up doing it again, you’d find the process a little bit odd. Things that previously came to you automatically would take some moments to come back. Even signing in to your computer can become odd if you haven’t done it in awhile. The reason for this is that we learn a lot by doing, and by paying attention to what we’re doing. Think about how easily you now talk about something like Covid-19. Across the year of 2020, people with no medical background suddenly found the ability to understand what a novel virus was, how community transmission worked, and why social distancing was important. If you pay attention, you’ll learn things without realizing.