Choose 3 Focus Areas for Your Continuous Learning Strategy

Does a continuous learning strategy fit into your professional roadmap? Are you always focused on learning new stuff, different ways of perceiving problems, and additive skills for professional improvement?

When you explore truly new ways of thinking, then doing, your entire professional performance is rewired and impacted, moving forward. You know the feeling, don’t you? It is both challenging and exhilarating.

That is the type of continuous learning strategy I urge you to adopt. Regardless of whether you are a knowledge worker or a manual worker. And regardless of your job title, pay grade, level of education, generation, or professional discipline.

How you choose to leverage a post-pandemic continuous learning strategy accelerates, or impedes, professional momentum.

Let’s say, during the pandemic, you opted to earn new / more professional certifications. Mostly because you finally had time to wrap your brain around topics for upskilling and reskilling. Truth be told, some of you earned an impressive number of credentials.

Now, what will you do to use each and every one of those certifications you earned? Because, in reality, it may be impossible to apply each one of those certs every single day. Plus, you and I have our favorites, don’t we? After a while, we become comfortable applying our favorite skills and go-to tools to every situation. As a result, the remainder of all those certifications and skills you earn tend to stagnate and gather dust.

However, what happens when you make a continuous, conscientious effort to refresh and recycle your considerable tools and skills each day? Not as individual applications, but together in combination? Because workplace scenarios represent combinations of complex variables interacting simultaneously.

The 2020 World Economic Forum identified these Top 10 critical professional skills for 2025. Where do your current skills fit into this continuum?

These 10 skills cover the gamut of what it takes to continuously evolve into a visible, relevant and valuable professional. You know all those certification courses you enrolled in over the past 12 months? Sort each of those courses (and your prior certs) under each of the following top 10 professional skills for 2025. Under which heading(s) do the majority of your certifications fall?

1. Analytical thinking and innovation
2. Active learning and learning strategies
3. Complex problem-solving
4. Critical thinking and analysis
5. Creativity, originality and initiative
6. Leadership and social influence
7. Technology use, monitoring and control
8. Technology design and programming
9. Resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility
10. Reason, problem-solving and ideation

Now, look at the areas under which your professional certifications are sorted. Are your skills skewed under 1 or 2 categories? Are there categories where you have earned no certifications? Where might you have a skills deficit (or two)? Regardless of your job title, pay grade, level of education, generation, or professional discipline, challenge yourself!

Choose 3 Areas of Focus as Your Continuous Learning Strategy

Does your professional comfort level firmly reside in relying on professional competence in 1 or 2 areas? However, when you must choose a 3^rd focus area for continuous learning, consider that 3^rd bucket just may scare you. Address that challenging feeling to catalyze your professional trajectory.

Move one millimeter beyond what is professionally comfortable today. Choose 3 professional areas of continuous learning focus. Lead everyone to where they really need to go, tomorrow and moving forward.

Planning your next team, corporate or association meeting? Searching for a one-on-one catalyst to get you unstuck? Engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person. Contact me here.

Babette Ten Haken | Change Catalyst | Purpose-Driven Professional Innovation | Cross-Functional Team Leadership | Trust-Based Client Retention | In Person & Virtual Speaker, Consultant, Coach, Author |

Babette Ten Haken, Founder & President of One Millimeter Mindset™ Speaking & Consulting, catalyzes trust-based, purpose-driven, cross-functional leadership. She leverages Voice of the Customer and storytelling to translate across communication and collaboration disconnects impacting successful business outcomes across people and professional disciplines. Babette is a cross-functional business-oriented STEM professional, qualitative Voice of the Customer facilitator, and Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality). She is a member of the ASQ, SHRM, PMI, the National Speakers Association. Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here. Image source: Adobe Stock.