Use Learning Preferences in Your Career
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Understanding your learning preferences and adapting your learning strategies can help you excel on the job. In fact, most companies want employees who can adjust to different work environments as needed to build new skills and perform new responsibilities.
FOR DISCUSSION: Have students describe a time when they had to adjust the way they work or communicate with someone to accommodate the other person’s preferences. What did they learn from this experience?
Work in a Team
To succeed in many careers today, you need to work in teams.4 As in school, members of a work team will likely have different learning preferences. When team members understand their own and one another’s preferences, they can build on each person’s strengths and adapt their interactions to address issues that arise.
Roger, for example, is a Sensing and Perceiving learner. He likes to work on several projects at once and focus on details. Sometimes he misses the big picture, and he juggles so many projects that none move forward as fast as his supervisor wants. Roger has been teamed with Katarina, an Intuitive and Judging learner, to manage a new project: developing a training program for orienting student nurses on the hospital floor. Katarina prefers to move one project forward at a time and readily grasps the big picture associated with each, but she’s less effective at tracking details. Roger and Katarina understand each other’s learning preferences and use that understanding to manage their project. For instance, Katarina uses her grasp of the big picture to help Roger understand the project’s overall goals: ensuring that student nurses understand policies and procedures and provide high-quality care without jeopardizing licensed professionals’ work. Roger uses his grasp of the details to suggest steps they must take to execute the project, including identifying policies to cover, teaching the students the roles and responsibilities of health care providers on the floor, and providing detailed descriptions of tasks student nurses are permitted to do. Together, Roger and Katarina cover each other’s blind spots, making their joint effort more successful than either of them would have been alone.
This flexibility is equally important for cultivating a good working relationship with your boss. The more you understand your preferences and your supervisor’s, the more you can customize how you work together. For instance, you learn that your boss prefers to receive status updates by e-mail every Monday, rather than by informal chats in the hallway, so you adapt your communication to his preference. One of your weekly reports alerts him to the possibility of a missed deadline on a project. He meets with you to discuss solutions, such as finding someone to help you meet the deadline. Both you and he benefit.
Supervise and Train Others
As you advance in your career, your job may include supervising or training less experienced employees. Understanding their preferences can help you tailor your approach to each employee to support their learning and development.
Consider Juanita, who has asked her assistant Derek to learn how to use a new inventory-tracking system. She has given him the printed instruction manual, but he’s struggling to make sense of it. By observing Derek at work, Juanita realizes that he’s a strongly Visual and Kinesthetic learner. He’s struggling with the instruction manual because it’s text-heavy. She enrolls him in a workshop where he can practice using the new system and gives him access to an online tutorial featuring diagrams and process flowcharts. Derek soon masters the new system — demonstrating the benefits that come when supervisors understand their employees’ learning preferences.
ACTIVITY: Divide students into groups. Give each group this scenario: “Ava’s boss changed the requirements for her position, and now Ava has to complete a class in medical terminology to keep her job.” Ask the groups to suggest teaching aids for Ava that correspond to the four VARK dimensions.
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voices of experience: employee
USING LEARNING STRATEGIES
ON THE JOB
| NAME: | Grace Ku |
| PROFESSION: | Social Media Manager |
| SCHOOL: | University of Utah |
| DEGREE: | Bachelor of Science |
| MAJOR: | Business Marketing |
“Using different learning styles and adapting to the styles of others has been critical to my success.”
While I was in college, I developed learning strategies that worked great for me. Once I got into the working world, I discovered that I needed to rely on a range of learning styles to interact effectively with my boss and the people I supervise.
When I started as a Social Media Intern, one of my first tasks was to create reports for my boss. I used the skills I built in college to organize and write reports. Then I’d e-mail them to my boss, and when she had questions I’d refer her to the report that I wrote. I discovered very quickly that this wasn’t working for her. She wanted me to boil down the information in the report so it fit onto a sticky note, and to give her answers myself when she had questions. I basically had to adapt to her learning style and get out of my comfort zone. Instead of writing and submitting reports like I had been, I needed to summarize information and be prepared to provide verbal answers on the spot.
After ten months on the job, I was promoted to Social Media Manager. When this happened, I had to find ways to communicate effectively with the whole team I supervise. I regularly send out information to my team members about what we need to get done that week. I quickly discovered that one of my team members is an Aural learner — I need to tell him what I expect face-to-face. If I send it in an e-mail, it won’t get done, but if I take a moment to discuss things verbally, he does great work. Using different learning styles and adapting to the styles of others has been critical to my success.
YOUR TURN: Have you ever had to adopt an unfamiliar learning strategy to work more effectively with a boss, a coworker, or an employee? If so, which strategy? What was the outcome?
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