Knowledge: Career Development A to Z

Knowledge

What

• Facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject: a thirst for knowledge her considerable knowledge of antiques.
• Information Skills - the important things that are vital or useful for your job/ relationship
• Acquired - Journey of learning. Over time we gain information and skills from both
• Experience or education - formal education and training together with personal exchanges and collaboration
• Example: my knowledge has been acquired more through experience than education. 

How

• Collaboration - working with others. 
• Education Training- in order to reach your destination, you have to have some idea as to how to get there. 
• Self awareness - knowing what needs to be improved to strengthen your strengths . 
• Example: over my career, I’ve gained knowledge mainly through experience and learning through self-awareness. Listening and collaboration has also been vital for understanding and learning 

Video:

https://tinyurl.com/4tpsypx5

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

As usual, let's begin with the definition and if we look at the Oxford English Dictionary we will see that knowledge is d uh uh what's the word not described? Oh defined. If we want to progress in our continue say you've learnt to ride a motorcycle, this is an example. Not the best one. No. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening wherever you are. And welcome to the latest episode of the My Coach Ben podcast. And we'll be continuing with our career growth A to Z. Firstly, before we get on to it, I'd like to give a warm welcome to the new subscribers and followers on the various social media channels. And also I would like to give a special thanks to Daniela and Johnny and the team at Radio Jamaica for giving me the opportunity to be on their show again. I'll leave a link to that. There was a career, another career discussion the week before last, I believe it was. So yes, I'll leave a link to that and you can you can listen to the recording, which uh was actually pretty pretty interesting, actually, if I say so myself. So do go and check that out if you have a chance. One quick point before we get into it is just to mention that uh June is men's mental health awareness month, and I would like to just remind the men and the women, of course, uh, who are related to some man, which is pretty much every woman, uh, that um we need to check in on the men folk and just make sure that they're okay, whether it's someone who is the uh archetypal life and soul of the party, or someone who's a little bit withdrawn, or just someone that you think has has kind of got a handle on everything, just give them a shout, make sure they're okay. Um, because as the saying is, and it's not just a saying, it is okay not to be okay. So let's just look out for each other, particularly among the men's the brothers. Let's take care of one another, and um, for the ladies, sisters, mums, girlfriends, daughters, etc. Please do look after the men folk and just um encourage them to speak up if something isn't right. As usual, remember to like, subscribe, press the notification bell as well, tell your friends, fam, or colleagues, and let's continue to develop this project that has been going so very well up to now. So, without further ado, let's get on to it. And following from last week's um letter, which was J for journey, we will of course be examining the letter K. And the letter K this week is going to be for knowledge. As usual, let's begin with a definition. And if we go to the Oxford English Dictionary, we will see that the word knowledge is defined as facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education, the theoretical practical understanding of a subject. And it gives a couple of examples there: a thirst for knowledge or a considerable knowledge of antiques. There you go, may come in handy someone. So let's break that down. Information and skills. Of course, information and skills is important in any line of work or any part of life if you want to um if you want to progress um in terms of learning, information is given to us on various topics, and then it's up to us to uh to build on that and to and to develop uh skills as a result of that um that information. Um and then it mentions um it's acquired, acquired through um it says experience or education, and I think it's similar to what we covered in last week's episode, which was um through the journey. Um, and by that I mean over time we gain knowledge, we gain information, we gain skills, and we gain understanding, and it's not just through education, um, but it's just um as we do our day-to-day jobs, relationships, we gain an understanding, we gain knowledge, we gain knowledge of people, we gain knowledge of our particular area of work or maybe a hobby or something. So this is um how we uh what we would call um acquiring or how we can relate acquiring to knowledge, um, and then it refers to experience or education. This is an interesting one. We can look at this the role of the formal education, so this can be whether it's some vocational education or some you know further education, maybe university, college, etc., or whether it's going to be the experience aspect of it where one learns uh mostly on the job. And if I take myself as an example, um I have gained knowledge of law and of finance as part of my journey, but then more recently in the job that I've been doing, actually for the last almost 30 years, that has come mainly through experience. Um, there have been one or two kind of courses and things that I've done. Um, I've read quite a few books as well, um, where there have been topics that I need to uh to brush up on or to acquire knowledge on. So I've done that, but a lot of it has been through experience, through collaboration with people. Uh so that um is an example of um of knowledge and how it can be acquired and the different ways. Of course, we're keeping this succinct here, we're not going into too much detail, but um you know, as most of us know, um, there's there's more than one way to skin a cat. Let's look at it that way, and um, you know, the topic of experience or education um are two things that we get from uh from the definition. So that's the what. Let's move on to the how. How does one gain knowledge? How does one become knowledgeable? Um, the first topic I've got on my list is maybe not the most important, but it is um something which comes to mind, and this is through collaboration. Now, when I say collaboration, we can talk about knowledge maybe in the educational sense, but most things, most topics advanced through collaboration. So, by collaboration, I mean let's say you're working in finance, for example, and you would have been taught various elements and various things related to finance, but then through collaboration with other people, you can deepen that knowledge, you can gain more experience of some of the topics, and actually you may develop your own knowledge or your own experience or your own theories, if you like, to uh some of the things that you may have been learnt, um may have been taught. So let's use the correct grammar. Um, and this is one of the things which we come in, which it comes into every every part of life where you know things knowledge is built upon knowledge and it comes through collaboration and through um working with other people in the in the same or similar field in order to deepen an understanding and gain more knowledge. The next one, of course, is education and training, and that's something we touched on on the um definition, um, and it's something that we all need to do if we want to progress in any particular field of work and or any um personal endeavour outside of the workplace. Education is something which it's a contentious one, I have to say, because often people feel that education may not cover the certain requirements of knowledge that is needed. Um but this is a this is a topic for another day. But certainly, if you're talking about in the workplace, um education is a must. If you want to um work in whichever kind of field, let's say energy, the field I'm in, then it helps to understand about uh things like um natural gas and calorific values, these kind of things. This is all knowledge that you have to gain along the way, and whether you do that through education, formal learning, um you know, there are many ways in which you can deepen your understanding and gain knowledge if you want to go into the energy industry as an example. And next point I have is self-awareness, and self-awareness is vital if you want to gain knowledge in in any field. Self-awareness I mean in terms of knowing yourself, perhaps what you need to improve. Um, and as you probably heard before, I always say, um, you know, forget your weaknesses and focus on your strengths, but strengths also need to be improved, and that means uh you need a certain element of self-awareness, um, where you can kind of let's say you you know you want to work in in energy or something, and you you you know there is a a topic that you're not really very uh very sharp on, and then you need to be self-aware enough in order to say, okay, well look, this is a particular weakness of mine. Um that's something I I need to improve. Um so for example, um if you're an energy trader, now trading is actually there's quite an emotional element to trading, and if you don't know about that, then it can be quite costly. And again, this is something that people um need to be quite self-aware about to know whether or not they're an emotional type or whether or not they're someone who you know they have a good poker face, or they can they can keep their head under pressure and things like that. So these are things where self-awareness comes in when we're talking about gaining knowledge and expanding knowledge in a particular field or endeavour. So, as an example, um over my career I would say most of my knowledge has come through experience and collaboration. Obviously, there's been some learning, whether it's in terms of law or finance and what have you, these things have been kind of indirectly related to uh to what I do, but um most of it has come through through experience, as I say, and collaborating with the right people, speaking to the right people, having the right support, all of these kind of things help you to get knowledge and to gain knowledge in order to um to improve improve your expertise or your performance in your job. So that's been vitally important as well as listening while this collaboration is taking place. There's a lot of people that are that are very knowledgeable, and you can do two things. You can pay five or ten thousand euros or quid or whatever for a course, um, and allied to that you can also speak to people that are already experts in that field, and you can learn, I would argue, equally as much, um, which is probably more relevant, let's say, over a period of time. Uh, allied to that, there's experience, good and bad experience. Yeah, I think in most in most fields we've all had our share of um of mess ups. Um, let's use another um four-lettered word before up. Um and we've learned from those, we've gained knowledge from those experiences over time, uh be they good or bad. Um, and this is um this is kind of how it goes in the journey of of work and life and everything else. So to summarize, how can we put this all together? Well, we looked at the what, the definition, the um the definition of knowledge. So facts, information and skills acquired through experience or education, the theoretical or practical understanding of a topic, and we mentioned, of course, the information and skills which one needs in order to deepen knowledge, and this is acquired over a period of time or over, let's say, um, the journey, as we mentioned in last week's topic, and of course, experience or education, a good mix of both, learning on the job, etc. This is one of the points that was mentioned in the definition. So that will be the what and of course the how. We mentioned first collaboration, and it's important to collaborate with people in a similar field or in the same field in order that you can you can gain knowledge and experience, and maybe some different perspectives against what you may have learned in the formal setting, which brings us on to education and and training, and this is something which most of us will need in our particular field in order, even to kind of um get a foot in the door. Um, you need to have some understanding, some knowledge of the field that you want to go into, and education and training is one way of doing that. Education I tend to regard as the base case, and then the training is something which is ongoing, you know, not one of these CPDs, let's say these continual professional development programs or whatever they're called these days. But essentially, this is just training and ongoing sharpening of the knowledge, let's say, and of course, self-awareness. You need to be aware because education and training can only take you so far, and then after that, you need to be self-aware to be able to say, Well, look, what exactly where am I falling short? You know, what do I need to improve? Whether it's my personal um self or whether it's the un my knowledge of a certain topic, or yeah, knowledge of myself. So these are things um that we need to look at, and then we just kind of went over the example of my career and how I have gained knowledge over the years through a mixture of experience and through formal education, etc., and of course, collaboration, which has been probably one of the most important things I would say. Um, a lot of people in most fields would say they've picked things up on the job from a colleague as opposed to their I don't know, professor in the uni saying, Well, look, A, B, and C. You know, usually it's um the knowledge is gained through the practical collaboration with uh with someone else. So on that note, I'm going to wrap it up there. Thank you very much for um stopping by. One thing I would like to mention actually is that this month, June, is of course men's mental health awareness month, and like most things, it doesn't extend um, it doesn't um just limit itself to one month, it's something that extends beyond that, and so I would like to um just point that out. And if you've got a friend, you know, the life and soul of the party, or you've got a friend who's a bit quiet, you know, these things don't discriminate. So just check on your buddies, check on yourself, um, just be honest with yourself, with your friends, and just make sure that um that people are okay because uh a problem aired is a problem shared, as we know. So I just wanted to mention that. As usual, like, subscribe, press the notification bell, and let's continue to grow the uh the community. And again, thank you very much for your time and for your attention, and of course, for stopping by. Let's uh catch up in the next one. So, peace until the next time, your coach Ben.