Activity 8 – Learning new skills

[Change Consult Ltd]

Now have a think about your own experiences:

Q1. What are your experiences of the ‘learning dip’?

Q2. How did this experience affect you and others?

Q3. What would have helped you through the ‘dip’?

[Lena Dankbar]

Q1: One good example of my learning dips is the work with Excel. Before I had any training I got frustrated almost every time I had to work with it, because I didn’t know the functions and formulas.

Q2: This learning dip changed my mood quite often and the work took even longer than it should have.

Q3: Training before the use would have helped a lot as I could directly apply my learnings.

[KIM YAN CHEN]

Q1. From my own experience in adopting new CRM platform in my company, our team encountered the stages of learning dip of unconscious competence at the beginning of using old CRM system, while they became “unconscious incompetence” when they first touch base on that, and then transformed to be “conscious incompetence” as they had no idea what they needed to learn of that platform. Finally, after training and best practises provided, they entered into “unconscious competence” again as they build skills and knowledge on how to use it.

Q2. It gave me an actual experience that there is a process of new skill learning of that Learning Dip theory.

Q3. It also helped me to understand that there are some key elements to support people for adopting changes in business world.

[Michael Gill]

Q1 I do contract work so often move between companies and have to deal with new systems and processes each time. With experience, the depth and duration of the dip is less. That’s because I am aware that it doesn’t take too long to learn the new systems and processes and I’m aware of the frustration when you have to tread a new path. Hence, the unconsious incompetence is less as, although I am not aware of what I don’t know, I generally know what to look for and the questions to ask. Then I move on to the consious incompetence where I’m learning what buttons to push and codes to use. Most companies aren’t that good at onboarding so moving on to consious competence is often quite hard as they don’t have adequate support and/or training to get through this part. The reality is that it is OTJ training that helps you to transition through to unconsious competence.

Q2 The main impact is on not getting too frustrated during onboarding – often hard when there isn’t the support. Generally, I make myself a pain by asking a lot of questions.

Q3 Cheat sheets, instructional videos, online user guides. Maybe a mentor for the onboarding. It’s difficult as I normally come in to a company outside of a normal intake so there is little formal onboarding set up.

[Patrícia Pires]

Q1: Learning how to work with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop (ok, with almost any adobe tool) was very challenging.

Q2: It was very fustrating at first due to the complexity of the tools and it took some time to learn and ultimately feel comfortable with it.

Q3: Knowing how and where to search for the information, or even having someone knowledgeable enough to teach me.

[Roberto Asensio]

Q1. What are your experiences of the ‘learning dip’?

Changing companies or merges, not knowing the organization and culture might be quite challenging.

Q2. How did this experience affect you and others?

Frustration, conflicts and misunderstandings were frequent.

Q3. What would have helped you through the ‘dip’?

A shadowing process.

[Author]

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