What Work Environment Offers the Best Learning Opportunities?
In their early career years, everyone wants to find a company and environment that offers them opportunities to learn and grow. From there, they hope to quickly improve their skills and experience to reach higher positions with better income. However, what many people jump from job to job looking for might not lie in finding a good company or a great boss, but rather in their own hands.
In this article, I’ll share my perspective and experiences from 8 years in the workforce. This includes 5 years managing a marketing (digital) team of 4-5 young professionals who ran the gamut from brilliant to struggling, proactive to passive, creative to rigid.
“I’m Not Learning Anything Here!”
This is a common complaint from young professionals when they’re frustrated with their company and want to quit. While I don’t oppose this thinking, I don’t fully agree with it either. When I first started working, I thought the same way, but after experiencing various companies and environments, I gained a different perspective.
In reality, a business’s goal is to make money, not to be a school with obligations to teach you this and that. Therefore, all activities revolve around generating revenue and optimizing costs. Training and human development activities, if they exist, must serve these missions.
You might see that creating conditions for employees to learn and develop helps improve their skills, leading to better work performance and higher revenue. It also helps employees feel satisfied with their benefits and reduces turnover, saving recruitment costs.
In challenging economic times like now, if we compare a company to a family, when they’re struggling to put food on the table, how many parents would prioritize their children’s education? The harsh reality is that business leaders often don’t care about employees the way parents care about their children.
But just because you were born into difficult circumstances with parents who couldn’t provide education doesn’t mean you should run away from home or accept a dark future. Many people (as you probably know) have found ways to succeed through self-learning while staying committed to their company (at least until the right time). They don’t just throw a fit and pack their bags at the first sign of trouble.
The Mindset Issue
So what’s the difference between the young professional mentioned above and me? It’s just a different mindset.
One mindset waits for someone to guide them and tell them what to do. They often demand guidance from their boss and expect regular training from the company. Sometimes they expect work to always be new and challenging for learning opportunities. Yet when given new tasks, they demand company training and guidance.
The other mindset sees learning opportunities in every person and task they encounter. They actively seek learning, whether through company resources, external courses, industry peers, or market trends. Sometimes, they spend time observing how others work, then study to replicate, apply, or improve upon it.
Sometimes we have one or both mindsets simultaneously. Recognizing where we stand isn’t always easy.
What to Learn, Where, and How?
Let’s address how to adapt and still develop yourself when placed in an environment that doesn’t provide learning resources.
1. Self-learning from the Environment: Observe + Question + Find Solutions
Sometimes sales pressure, workload, pace, deadlines… force your boss, colleagues, and everyone in the company to run themselves ragged. When time is a luxury, who’s willing to spare it to teach you? On weekends, older folks are busy with family, while younger ones might want to catch up with friends over coffee (and that’s only if they like you and find you valuable).
Sometimes, when I have enough energy, I use time outside work hours (early morning or late evening) to teach young team members. However, young folks often come in late, or if I keep them late, they think about how the company doesn’t pay overtime.
If you find yourself in this situation, self-learning is your best option. Start by carefully observing how your seasoned colleagues or boss do things. Then try to be curious, ask yourself why they do things that way, and seek answers. Try putting yourself in their shoes and come up with ways to handle tasks your own way.
This way, you’ll develop self-learning skills and improve your problem-solving abilities. So when you’re assigned new tasks later, you won’t feel lost anymore. At least you’ll have some understanding of it already. Colleagues and bosses will appreciate this because you help them save considerable time teaching you. Next, if there’s a little time, discuss your researched solutions with others. If they’re not good, you’ll learn a lesson. If they are good, you’re providing initiative for the company.
2. Establish a Learning Plan Based on Needs
Many people “don’t know what they don’t know.” If you’re in this blind spot, it will be hard to learn anything or realize you need to learn it. Therefore, the first step is to identify your blind spots and the skills and knowledge you need to fill them through two methods:
- Ask for opinions and evaluations from your boss, leaders, and senior colleagues about you and the knowledge you want to learn
- Research the capabilities, knowledge, and professional skills needed in your field, and self-assess your abilities
When doing this step, be sure to be truly impartial, strict with yourself, and become more humble.
Next, set very specific goals for this learning and prioritize the knowledge and courses you need to take. You can set goals like: how much time to spend learning each week, the content you want to achieve after completing the course, how to measure learning effectiveness, how to apply what you’ve learned to work or continue practicing until it becomes second nature. While some goals will be difficult to quantify, try to make them as clear as possible so you can commit and stay motivated.
A crucial part of finding courses is choosing quality “teachers” or reputable training providers. Currently, “fake experts” are very active on social media, while truly skilled people are busy working. Therefore, be very careful in choosing where to learn and who to learn from. You should consult several people who have studied there to be more certain. For marketing courses, I suggest choosing Brand Camp, with over 200 online courses taught by leading expert instructors.
Finally, after choosing a satisfactory course and “teacher,” arrange your time to study and maintain discipline and commitment to your learning plan.
3. Connect with Friends and Industry Leaders
Beyond your internal environment not giving you what you need, sometimes sitting too long in one position, company, or industry can cause your general knowledge to atrophy, become outdated, or more biased. This makes you less attractive or gives you fewer options in the future when you want to change jobs. Therefore, always update and learn more by following friends, leaders, and industry experts on social media (LinkedIn or Facebook). There will be some peer pressure, but it will be good for you.
Another quite effective way to learn is attending seminars. This is a great opportunity to update information, gain fresh perspectives, broaden your views, and thus become more thorough about the field you want to explore. To attend seminars effectively, you’ll need to read these two articles:
As an introvert (like me), I generally shy away from seminars, networking, and such. But I particularly enjoy deep coffee conversations. Each month, I try to arrange one coffee date with a friend or senior colleague in the industry to “chat.” The main content usually involves updating each other on life and work, sharing trends and stories, (gossiping about drama), and most importantly, discussing work challenges. I also take the opportunity to seek advice if appropriate.
4. Practice Through Personal Projects
If in your current work environment, you don’t have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned or practice new knowledge, create your own environment for training by building personal projects.
For example, I tried creating a Facebook page, coding a personal website, running Facebook and Google ads, and setting up a TikTok channel when these platforms first appeared… I actively explored everything, partly out of curiosity, partly out of passion for this field. Some time later, when my company had new projects requiring these specialties, I could confidently guide the whole team and received high praise from my boss and colleagues. Sometimes the projects I did on my own, like the TikTok channel, succeeded beyond expectations and became an effective communication channel for my wife and my business.
Additionally, personal projects are something many recruiters value about me through each job change. I myself often look at portfolios and personal projects of young people when searching for potential candidates for the company.
Which Environment Offers the Most Learning?
In the first part of this article until now, I’ve talked a lot about self-learning when you’re placed in an environment that doesn’t encourage learning. So, if you could choose again, or if you’re looking for your next career destination, what criteria should you use to “pan for gold”? I’ll analyze this next.
1. Focus on Solutions, Free Discussion, and Constructive Contributions
You probably know what I mean, but let me give an example for clarity. In some “fast-paced” companies, everything is pushed very quickly, urgently, and people are pressured to make decisions in short timeframes. Therefore, when you propose solutions, bosses and experienced colleagues will limit pointing out issues for you to improve. Also, people don’t have time to sit together to debate and analyze to improve the proposed solutions. Even worse, they might use their experience to impose and choose a solution without bothering to explain why to you.
As a middle manager, I’ve been both an enthusiastic newbie contributing ideas and a manager imposing experience. In such times, I became aware that I was becoming ugly when letting the work pace push me too far from my good intentions.
Remember that a good environment will create conditions for you to express initiatives, contribute constructively, and give you time to improve, or even if they crush your ideas, they still light the way for you to escape darkness. I call this the moment of enlightenment at work.
2. Allows You to Make Mistakes
I’ve met some young people who are so afraid of making mistakes that they don’t dare to do anything. This leads to a situation where they demand I review everything, while that’s not what a manager wants from a subordinate. When assigning work to them, I want them to solve problems proactively with minimal supervision from me, helping me save time. Not having everything shown to me, and then if I’m too busy to review it and work gets delayed, they turn around and blame me for not correcting or giving feedback.
In this example, I’m setting aside the capability issue and only looking at the fear of making mistakes - if you don’t dare to do anything, you’ll forever be stuck in that infinite loop and never improve. Remember that failure is the mother of success. Many times, learning, reading books, being guided… don’t stick in your memory like making mistakes yourself.
In the business environment, bosses or managers need to establish policies to protect employees in cases where they make mistakes with good intentions - they genuinely didn’t want to do it. This will encourage creative employees, giving them freedom and enthusiasm to perform work in many effective ways for better results.
As for me, I often advise young people “don’t be afraid of mistakes anymore, go ahead boldly, if you make mistakes I’ll cover for you, as long as it’s within my control.” Mistakes help us grow, just note not to make the same mistake more than 3 times!
3. Has Time for Learning and Development
The learning time I’m talking about here doesn’t just mean when a company has training sessions. I’ve seen it before - companies organize training sessions and require employees to do assignments, grade them and such, while the training content doesn’t connect with daily work, and employee workload is already very heavy. As a result, training becomes a nightmare for everyone rather than carrying its original good intentions.
In my opinion, “having time” here means:
- Reasonable workload, deadlines, and project timelines set reasonably, people have enough time to research, evaluate, and adjust.
- The team has fixed time to share, exchange, and train each other on topics related to ongoing work and projects.
- Employees have quiet time outside working hours to freely participate in training programs they desire.
- It’s a plus if the company has training sessions, coaching provided by external experts, but they need to complement the work, help personnel solve their problems better, shouldn’t add burden to personnel.
Conclusion - The Trade-off
The reason I said “pan for gold” in the middle part about good environments is because such businesses are rare, or pay less attractively… And don’t think that education companies will have an “educational” environment. Try checking Company Reviews, quite a few education companies have very toxic environments, both my wife and I have experienced this.
In each life stage, each person has their own goals. If you’re looking for a place to develop your internal strength and foundational knowledge, you’ll certainly need to pay a price. That price might be:
- Lower income than market rate
- Slower work pace, sometimes making you bored
- Older bosses and colleagues (but remember, the older the ginger, the spicier it gets)
- Some positions have little long-term development opportunity (5 years) even though you can learn a lot in the short term (2 years)
- And some other prices you’ll gradually realize
Remember that to achieve anything, you need to trade something of yours. Because you deserve better things, keep holding onto those positive intentions and rise up.
Wishing you success.