Learning a new skill is not difficult. There’s a lot of information available about what skills to learn to advance your career, but not much about crafting a learning plan to master those new skills. If you want to know how to learn a new skill, you need to discover your own learning preferences and understand some basic educational principles. As you master this information, you’ll be able to learn new, higher paying skills more quickly and accelerate your career.
Learning Principles
You will learn a new skill more quickly if you understand some basic principles of learning:
– Use your eyes, ears and activities
Experts usually break learning channels into three categories: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (or, hands-on) learning. The best way to teach or learn varies from person to person and may change depending on the type of skill you’re trying to master. The best way to learn a new skill would be to use a combination of all these channels. If you are trying to learn a new software skill for example, you could watch an online video (visual), have someone who knows the software explain it to you (auditory), then dive in and try to do the software tasks yourself (kinesthetic).
– Active learning is better than passive learning
Another thing to remember about learning a new skill is that you will learn it faster (and retain it longer) if you actively participate while trying to learn it. People who passively sit and listen to a presentation don’t retain very much (if any of it) 24 to 48 hours after the class. People who participate in some type of hands-on or application exercise are able to recall the information much better than those who don’t.
As you work to learn a new skill, don’t simply read through a book hoping you will recall the information when you need it. Immediately try to apply what you’ve learned. Try to use the actual tools or techniques you learn as often as possible.
– Learn in “chunks”
People can generally understand, process and remember about seven pieces or “chunks” of information in a given study session. It takes time and effort to comprehend these pieces of information, attach meaning and context to them, and then store them in your long term memory. What this means for you and your own skill development is that you will learn more effectively when you break your study sessions up into smaller intervals rather than using one longer stretch.