Skills that aid Learning

College courses teach content, and you learn and hopefully retain that content, especially if you try to be conscious of the experiential learning cycle and reflect on, think about, and apply the content from your college courses.

But there’s a broader dimension to your education as well, which deals with thinking about the process of learning itself. What worked well, didn’t work well, and what action steps did you take as you learned in your college courses?  What learning skills can you apply to other situations, both professional and personal?

Thinking about and dealing with learning skills can help you maximize your education, since those learning skills are the conduit to helping you apply your knowledge in different contexts.  Just Google “skills employers are looking for” and you’ll see lists of learning skills such as communication, analytical ability, teamwork, flexibility, quantitative skills, resilience, and more. There is a lot of similarity in these lists of skills on sites such as Indeed.com, NACE (National Association of Colleges and Employers), LinkedIn, the U.S. Department of Labor, and many colleges and universities.

Planning your education can involve a conscious investigation of learning skills, skills that can be adapted to professional and personal contexts as well as academic.