How to build a lifelong learning culture in a company

No matter whether your team members work remotely or in the office, the environment around them determines their productivity and satisfaction. If employees are actively searching for new knowledge and take the initiative to improve their skills and, therefore, their lives, your company will thrive along with each employee. If they just wait for their salary and perform tasks passively, they’ll be bored and your business will produce just a fraction of its full value potential.

Here, we’ll see how to reach the first option and avoid the second one.

We can always find, explore, and invent something new, so learning is a lifelong process of searching and creating new knowledge, and the more we’re engaged in it, the more efficient and satisfied we are. One may say that we can hardly be satisfied by the necessity to search for something constantly and tinker with endless chunks of information. It’s true that learning can be boring, but it also can be the most interesting process in the world.

It’s the question of motivation, organization, and management.
But first, let’s define our subject!

Instead of pushing yourself and others to study something with the stressful feeling of urgency, it’s much more efficient to create a culture of responsibility and accountability where learning is the everyday and engaging process. That’s the lifelong learning definition: the constant journey of exploration of the knowledge present and producing new ones, relevant to each specific situation. It also includes the nurturing of an environment where people are empowered and motivated to learn new things, both for the company and their own personalities.

Thus, lifelong learning meaning includes exploring the vast amount of knowledge present in the modern world with the aim of using it for certain purposes. No information is useful when you cannot apply it to a certain idea, task, concept, or another conscious process. So, the task here is to build an environment where all required tasks are clearly defined and relevant ideas can be easily generated while providing this environment with relevant knowledge such as books, online courses, and infographics.

For efficient lifelong learning education, we need to ensure three the most important components: motivation, organization, and risk management. While the two former are basic elements of any corporate education process, the latter includes a thorough analysis of the skills necessary to learn and each learner’s preferences and predisposition. Based on that, we can determine which knowledge we need and how to use it with the most efficiency for learners. We’ll see how these components apply at the end of the article.

And now, let’s see several well-known examples of their application.

Some distinguished companies can offer bright examples of lifelong learning, from which you can learn a lot.

Google, for example, has a famous 20% policy that has been in use since as early as the 2000s. It means that all the company’s employees are not only permitted but even highly encouraged to spend approximately 20% of their work time on their side projects. They polish their work skills and increase their work satisfaction greatly, generating new ideas constantly and creating their own projects. Google benefits from it directly: it obtains a high-quality workforce with a great flow of innovative ideas and can buy the best of these side projects, enriching itself even further.

The result is clearly visible to everyone: it’s hard to imagine a more innovative company than Google.

Other companies also build a rich culture of lifelong learning. IBM sees it as its key objective and has a vast online course library for its employees. Knowledge acquisition and mentorship are highly welcomed and rewarded in the company, so its level of technological competency remains very high. The result is also can clearly be seen: IBM is the leading company in quantum computing research, a knowledge-intensive and highly prospective field that will probably explode in the next few years.

The Google example shows clearly why is lifelong learning important, but you probably need a sound list of theses you can use for your objectives. So, let’s see it!

That’s about the importance. If you’ll build a lifelong learning culture in your company, you need more specific objectives. Let’s formulate them!

Next, we can proceed directly to the advantages of lifelong learning and see how nurturing such a culture will make your company flourish and fountain with innovative ideas. After that, we’ll see how to actually build such a culture, starting with the objectives you need to reach. So, let’s see them!

A good reading should end up with something that will get you a new chunk of knowledge about something. Here, we’ll help you with the lifelong learning plan creation to bring everything together, so let’s start with the three most important elements: motivation, organization, and risk management.

Last, let’s see specific strategies for adopting lifelong learning based on these three elements, so you can apply them to reach the necessary benefits and objectives. It’ll be the best article’s conclusion.