Blog Post: Knowledge as a Network Phenomenon -- Developing Your Own Professional Development

Think back to when you were an infant.  The world was an amazing place, and you did all you could to learn about it.  You stooped down on tottering legs to take the earth in your hands.  You stretched your frustratingly short arms as far as you could to touch a butterfly, a bubble, a leaf.  You experienced the world, and through your experiences, you learned about the world.

But you weren’t alone, were you?  You had a network of people to help you with this – your relatives. You had Dad to hoist you on his shoulders so you could reach that tree leaf.  You had Mom to move with the swiftness of a hummingbird as she kept you from ingesting strange bugs, or touching the hot handle of a skillet.

This close-knit network expanded as you grew, from parents to coaches, best friends, and teachers.  You learned just as much from everything surrounding school as you did from school itself.  And this continues to this day.

I began this posting with the quote from Mz. Spolin because it’s important to consider our learning  environment.  We learn through experiencing, sure, but we rely upon a network of people to help guide that which we experience.  Why is this necessary?  Because we experience a lot without knowing whether or not the experience was good or bad.  It’s our network who provide the necessary points of view to guide us along.

For the first few years of my growth in the workplace learning and development field, I didn’t know where to look.  I had taken a class or two on training, but still I muddled through, making errors here and there, jeopardizing my career once or twice.  My path eventually crossed that of a mentor who pointed me in the right direction, encouraged some of my instinctive training styles, discouraged quite a few others.  After years, I found myself in a position to begin succeeding in a workplace learning and performance career.

In this day and age, who has years?

My challenge in my first few years as a trainer was not that I didn’t know what to do, it was that my environment was not conducive to my professional development. I didn’t have a large enough network to let me know what I was doing.  The only way to learn is to improve your network, to improve your learning environment.

This means that you can’t be just learners in today’s environment, you need to be subscribers of learning. 

You can’t wait for information to find its way to you in the form of a seminar that you come across.  You need to actively seek out, to find your way to the information. How?  Expand your network.  In this day and age, this is much easier than one may think.  There’s a whole network of information out there, just waiting. Some sample resources:

• Wireless computing.  More and more, the internet is available where you are.  If you find something you’re interested in, chances are you can Google it then and there. 
• Blogs.  Like this one.  If you locate a blog that holds something of interest, subscribe to it using the RSS button.  The information you want, you get.
• Networking communities.  Linked In, ASTD Connect, discussion boards.  These are all resources that allow you to ask questions other people of similar interests.  You might not know these people, but you know that they are connected by a common knowledge base, and they are willing to aid a larger community.

But wait!  Just as you will meet people who don’t know stuff and don’t know that they don’t know it, you will also find such confident incompetence in the internet.  The challenge, then, is to challenge what you learn.  You can no longer become a passive learner, believing everything you read from the resource you just found, or everything you hear from the person you just met.  Sure, Wikipedia is not accepted by academia as a viable resource for research papers.  But should Encyclopedia Britannica be your single source of information, then?

Locate different resources!  (We’re constantly updating our Resources page at www.astdoc.org.) Find experts, and see who they turn to when they have a question.  Find opposing opinions!  Validate them, or invalidate them!  Join the world wide dialogue!  Allow yourself the opportunity to glean from the wisdom of those willing to share.  You will be surprised at what you learn.

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