Working Adults Need To Keep Relearning Throughout Their Careers

This is a commonly cited challenge. There’s one thing I tell my children over and over, especially my eldest son, who’s in elementary school. Lately he’s started to pick up on it, and he increasingly brings it up himself before I even say anything. That thing is: “Value the ability to learn on your own above all else.”

No matter how old I get, no matter what profession or status I hold, I believe relearning is always necessary. Throughout this full set of 100 answers, I’ve deliberately tried to touch on as many topics as possible. I haven’t narrowed it down to any specialized use case. Some of what I know I picked up early in my career, some I picked up after moving to the US, and some came from insights gained through the ups and downs of a startup. All of it has come from continuous learning.

When people hear the phrase “relearning,” most probably imagine something large in scale — going back to university, say, or getting a doctorate through a part-time graduate program while working. But relearning doesn’t have to be that big. Of course, going back to university can bring good results at some major career fork in the road.

J, who I worked with in Silicon Valley, told me he originally earned his first bachelor’s degree specializing in analog audio, but after realizing his scope of work was very narrow, he went back and got another degree in electrical and electronic engineering. He now works at Fitbit. J, the former town doctor I introduced earlier, went back to graduate school at MIT, where he met L, who would become CTO at founding, and a professor who agreed to provide technical support — and that’s how his startup got off the ground. He now works at Facebook.

In the US, people make career changes, large or small, this way through earning degrees. American society places relatively heavy emphasis on academic credentials. There are various reasons behind this, I think, but one is that there isn’t much of a sense of companies developing their own employees. The attitude of “we want to hire people who can already do the job to some degree” is strong, and that tends to make degrees important.

In Japan, fortunately, degrees aren’t necessarily emphasized to that extent. So I think the key to enriching your career is to keep acquiring useful knowledge through short bursts of relearning as needed, without spending large sums of money or long stretches of time.

Rather than large-scale relearning, what I personally recommend strongly as small-scale relearning is reading books. And not so-called “enlightenment books” or “practical how-to books,” but “specialized/technical books.” Not books written by some self-styled consultant, but books written by, ideally, a mainstream university professor in that field — the kind of book used in actual university lectures. The internet is overflowing with information, but in reality it’s an extreme mix of gems and junk. There was once a scene on a TV program where a guest was shocked to be told “Wikipedia has a lot of falsehoods in it” — but the internet’s strength is the ease with which anyone can publish, and that same ease of publishing is exactly what lowers the overall reliability of the information as a whole. Books, by contrast, especially specialized/technical books, tend to have a reputation for being old-fashioned, difficult, hard to read, and requiring a lot of time and effort. But since the purpose of most specialized/technical books is to organize knowledge systematically, nothing is better suited to the act of “learning.”

By the way, I have a recommended approach for tackling books in a field where you’re an outsider. This came up once in conversation with a consultant, Mr. O: “just read three books for now.” Rather than carefully reading one book at a time, looking up every term you don’t understand and taking notes, you just read three books in the same category without thinking too hard about it. Then, as you get through the second and third books, you start noticing words you recognize, the same lines of argument, the same graphs, the same historical facts showing up again. Once you’ve had that kind of experience, you almost never forget that knowledge.

Finally, the simplest form of relearning, one you can start tomorrow with minimal effort, is “asking questions.” If an unfamiliar term comes up in a meeting, ask about it on the spot. If a discussion at work jumps to a conclusion — something that seems to be tacit knowledge to everyone else — ask about the reasoning behind it. If the person at the next desk is doing work different from yours, take an interest in that work too, full of mysterious jargon as it may be, and ask about it. This, in fact, is also something I often tell my elementary-school son from the beginning of this piece: “What’s embarrassing isn’t not knowing something. What’s embarrassing is not being honest enough to say you don’t know.”

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/08/535/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.