You can easily feel trapped when working a nine-to-five job. Maintaining a full-time job makes it impossible to find time for yourself, enjoy your favorite activities, or develop interpersonal or work skills.
Since you’re crazy busy during the day, you can’t learn a new skill that can help you take on better projects, find a new job, or start your own business.
But here’s the thing: if you’re willing to put in the hard work and sacrifice your free time, you can develop new skills while working full-time. But did you ever wonder “why you need to develop new skills or hone the current ones?” Here is why:
Benefits of Learning New Skills
Gaining new skills has become a prerequisite in the corporate sector. Today, recruiters and c-level executives are not as much interested in degrees as the skills you’ve learned or picked up over the course of your academic or professional career. It diversifies your portfolio, provides access to new growth opportunities, and helps you adapt to the fast-paced world. This section will highlight six core benefits of learning new skills, irrespective of age, profession, and career level.
- Helps Achieve Goals
- Boost Self-Confidence
- Inculcate Leadership Skills
- Improve Adaptability To Changing Times
- Explore And Experiment Innovation
Step-by-Step Guide to Learning New Skills
Although the benefits of learning new skills are many, it is not easy to do, as discussed earlier. Time often offers a constant challenge on your journey of being skillful and proficient. Here are seven steps to help you learn new skills.
Practice Your Time Management Skills
Whether you want to put your current knowledge to the test or learn new skills, you’ll have to take out some time and consistently dedicate your efforts.
More importantly, you need to master time management skills to ensure all tasks are completed according to schedule. By practicing time-management skills, you can effectively prioritize your job-related tasks and course-related assignments.
You must follow these steps to improve your time management skills:
- Start your tasks early
- Set your boundaries
- Give yourself well-deserved breaks
- Prioritize your tasks
- Schedule tasks and assignments
- Learn your patterns of productivity
- Reinforce your good habits
Start at the Right Place before Diving In
Before you invest your time, money, and energy into a course, ask yourself: which skills do you currently possess? And which skills do you need to build up?
This way, you can find a course that matches your interests and helps you excel at your workplace.
Always Think Visually
Research reveals that you retain only 10% of what you hear, whereas you remember 80% of what you see. Thus, infographics, charts, illustrations, and dynamic data portrayals are essential to adopt new skills.
Take an Online Class or Courses
The Internet has become a significant feature of the learning ecosystem for over decades. But the recent pandemic propagated the importance of online education. Choosing this route enables you to select from various classes to learn about your desired topic more easily.
An online master’s in electronics, for instance, allows you to acquire skills necessary to excel in your field of work without having to go to school. Plus, most online courses don’t have strict deadlines and have a flexible schedule that makes it easy to integrate it within your work schedule.
Consult an Expert to Get Valuable Recommendations
If you’re unable to choose between different courses, consider talking to an expert.
This way, you can get recommendations about a helpful training course, excellent reading material, or valuable first-hand knowledge to get started.
Work on Things You Need
As per research, over 36 million individuals in America lack basic work skills. So, why not start learning something simple yet valuable, such as repairing your car, meditation, financial management, etc.
Set SMAART GOALS
Before diving in and starting your course, take some time to create your “big picture” based on the reasons for learning a particular skill and how it will help you.
Next, focus on setting SMAART goals to achieve your long-term goals:
- S- Specific
- M- Measurable
- A- Attributable
- A- Actionable
- R- Realistic
- T- Time-Sensitive
The Bottom Line
There are innumerable ways you can learn new skills while working a full-time job. So, don’t be discouraged by thinking you don’t have enough time or energy.
Remember that your short-term sacrifice will pay off once your reach your goals.
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