Never stop learning
Businesses thrive on developing new ideas and seeing them come to fruition. Prosure360 is the living, breathing proof of this. Encouraging our team to take their idea of improving visibility across supply chains and make it a reality involved a lot of learning by everyone in the team, but that spirit and drive created something ground-breaking.
Learning should never stop. There is always something new to discover, always a way to improve the status quo, always a different way of looking at things. It’s something we encourage our team to do, both inside and outside of work. We hope through embracing flexible and remote working our employees will have a better work/life balance with the opportunity and time to pursue the things they want to learn both in work and in their own time.
Learning at Work Week takes place from 16th to 22nd May. The theme this year is Learning Uncovered. It highlights the importance of learning from all employees, helping to encourage greater inclusion in the workplace by getting as many people involved as possible.
To celebrate the week, we asked some our team to share with us what they are learning at work and what they are studying in their spare time:
Rob: I’m always reading and have a desire to keep learning and expanding my knowledge. When I joined last year, we didn’t have a product development tool, so I encouraged them to introduce new software called Aha! I recently went on a course to understand how we could use it more effectively in the business, which has not only helped me, but also the wider team.
Lina: My degree was in Interior Design, and I recently completed a Diploma in it. We are currently renovating our house, which is a big job. Whenever we are not working, we are consumed by that, so that has reignited my interest and I am thinking of taking an MA at some point.
Robin: I’m not studying for any qualifications, but I’m really interested in history, particularly Russian history, which is very pertinent at the moment. I was planning to go on a three week trip this summer with my son-in-law, travelling through Russia and Ukraine, but sadly the terrible events mean this won’t be happening for some time.
Indy: I’m currently preparing for my SSIP Assessor qualification and hope to build upon that going forward with either other formal Auditor/Assessor qualifications or, who knows, maybe something around Leadership and Management.
Making life better through useful hacks
Learning is not just about formal courses or qualifications. We all pick up little bits of knowledge every day that make our lives just that bit better. Sharing this knowledge is a great way to build connections between people and create effective teams. We asked our team what their best work or life hacks are:
Indy: I always think about one positive thing and two or three things to be grateful for before I go to bed and then again when I wake up. My working life has often been hard, dealing with the often-conflicting demands of employers and contractors. The ability to stay positive has really helped me and I believe staying positive is the key to both work and life.
Lina: If you accidentally have caps lock on, instead of deleting the text and starting again, you can highlight the text in caps and hit shift + F3 to switch it back to lowercase.
Robin: Over my career, the thing I’ve learned is to keep it simple. While it might be tempting to add lots of detail or functionality, more often than not, less is more.
Rob: Surround yourself with the best people. Working with those who you trust and whose opinions you value is like gold dust. I really value having people I work with who I can bounce ideas off and talk things through with. There is nothing better than working in a strong team and achieving successes together.
We know first-hand that encouraging learning at work has enormous benefits. It stimulates new ideas, brings people together and creates stronger relationships. Take a look at some ideas about how you could embrace it at your organisation during Learning at Work Week this year.