At the start of a new year, the pressure to set career development goals, when your workload is already full to bursting, can make you feel like you’re at the bottom of Ben Nevis with no chance of clambering to the summit. Try every-day, bitesize, learning instead.
by Karen Pagett
For communications professionals in 2020, there’s a never-ending need to update your knowledge and improve your skills in ways that couldn’t have been predicted at the start of the millennium. The communications world has been revolutionised by technical/digital advances and a more process-driven approach, with research and evaluation as important as creativity.
These massive shifts mean that learning and development planning for a typical communicator can be a complicated business. How does a manager decide where their training budget should be spent for the best outcomes; how does an individual know what to prioritise for career progression?
Strangely, this issue came more sharply into focus for me once I’d left a long-time job in local government (the last eight years of which were spent in a permanent period of change and re-education) to freelance and no longer had a formal learning plan to fall back on.
About a year ago I was commissioned to rewrite a company’s website and communicate the business through blogs, case studies and social media posts. But the company operates in a field about which I know very little. Online advertising is a world of pixels and programmatic, real-time bidding and reach, and seemingly endless data privacy regulations while I was a self-confessed digital dunderhead!
To overcome being stumped by the new subject matter (and to enable me to explain it to other non-experts), I found a way to learn in manageable chunks that I could incorporate into my working day. Maybe if I’d figured this out in my previous incarnation, I wouldn’t have felt so overwhelmed by all the stuff I didn’t know?
Three ways to learn bitesize
Use your inbox as a daily prompt
To get a feel for the unfamiliar terminology and issues of a new field, read what people in the know are talking about – even if you don’t understand half of what’s being said at first. I found setting up Google Alerts helpful. By registering a few key phrases, I get links to relevant articles in my Gmail inbox daily that keep me up to date with digital happenings.
I’ve also signed up to email newsletters from appropriate go-to experts, organisations and news providers. One of the great plusses of digital is in the generosity of those willing to do so much of the donkey work for you by rounding up news, views and insights. My favourites are daily updates from UKAuthority on the public sector digital world and the latest in politics, PR and blogging from Vuelio.
Set aside ten minutes each morning over a coffee to browse and make a note of any useful links. It doesn’t really matter if you miss a day, there’s always more tomorrow, and the next day…
2. Get happy to be an idiot
It’s part of a communicator’s skills armoury to ask questions. Get quizzical with colleagues, friends, people you meet at events, and anyone else who crosses your path with knowledge you need. My ‘old school’ reporter’s notebook is always open. I make no apologies for asking the same question several times in different ways at the risk of looking dense! If I’m going to communicate info to others, I need to unpick every bit of jargon and every complex process.
If you “hot desk” at work, you could even take your laptop and sit with a team which has expertise or skills in a field you’d like to know more about, to get a first-hand feel for their work.
3. Don’t wait for formal training – keep skills fresh online
When working in the public sector, I thought the limited number of training days available were my only chance to learn. It was always disheartening to return to work from a course only to find I wasn’t given the space to practise new skills. It felt like a tick-box exercise and a waste of time.
I’d have felt more satisfied with my progress had I undertaken more regular learning as and when it was needed to improve straight away how I did my job. And there are resources online to help. I recommend the Google Digital Garage set-up. They offer 125 online courses – the majority free – split into truly bitesize sections (some, literally, minutes long) with knowledge-reinforcing mini tests along the way.
Some of the courses are bundled together and come with certification on completion (like the course on Digital Marketing which I did), or you can just fill specific gaps in your knowledge from the basics of artificial intelligence or effective SEO through to conflict resolution or inspiring leadership. Many have been designed by universities.
The digital advertising company who inspired my bitesize learning habit when they commissioned me – CAN – is itself developing a learning resource for comms folk featuring award-winning and measurably successful campaigns, including many from comms2point0 UnAwards winners called Comms-HIVE.
The rapidity of digital and technical advances has made sure none of us will ever be at the end of the learning process. The world is permanently in the fast lane. But by taking steps to remain constantly curious in small ways without feeling overwhelmed by it all, you can figure out when something coming down the line will make your work easier, give you better results, and – importantly – keep up your self-confidence.
I’m somewhere in the middle of my steep learning curve – and always will be!
Karen Pagett is a freelance writer currently working for CAN, which delivers digital advertising – and more – for the public sector. To find out more about CAN’s work – including the Comms-HIVE learning resource – sign up to the monthly ebulletin and say hello on Twitter @counciladnet
