The Lifelong Apprentice

The Lifelong Apprentice

When did learning become something we were supposed to finish?

We leave school, complete an apprenticeship, gain a qualification or reach a senior position, and somewhere along the way it becomes easy to think we’re now the person with the answers.

I’ve spent much of my working life in engineering, education and leadership. Each of those has taught me the same lesson: experience matters, but it doesn’t make us finished.

Think about the enthusiasm an apprentice brings into a workplace. They want to understand how things work. They ask questions that more experienced colleagues stopped asking years ago. They’re keen to have a go, and they can see possibilities that the rest of us have learned to walk past.

That energy is valuable. Yet we often treat it as something people are bound to lose as they gain experience. What if, instead, we tried to capture it and bring some of it into everything we do?

We talk a great deal about continuous professional development, or CPD. Often, that means a course, a certificate or a record of hours completed. Those things have their place. But if learning only happens when a course is booked, it isn’t continuous.

The most useful learning can start in the middle of an ordinary working day. An apprentice asks why we do something a particular way. A colleague challenges a decision. A customer tells us something we didn’t want to hear.

What happens next matters. Do we brush it aside because we’re busy and experienced, or do we get curious?

To me, CPD works best as a routine. We notice what we need to learn, make time to explore it, try something different and then ask whether it worked. Sometimes that calls for formal training. Sometimes it means watching someone more skilled, practising, reading or having an honest conversation.

And sometimes it means giving ourselves room to think.

In one of our organisations, I introduced a thinking hour. Every colleague was given an hour each month to sit quietly in a room on their own and let their thoughts wander wherever they wanted to go.

There was no meeting agenda to get through and no demand to produce a brilliant idea by the end of the hour. I wanted people to have space away from the usual rush: to think about a challenge, question a familiar way of working or follow an idea that might otherwise have disappeared under the day’s jobs.

It helped us spot improvements and find answers. I’m fairly sure it also led to the occasional catnap. If so, perhaps someone needed that hour more than we realised.

The point was that people need time to think as well as time to do. If every hour is filled with the next task, we shouldn’t be surprised when nobody has room to ask whether there’s a better way.

That’s what I mean by being a lifelong apprentice.

An apprentice isn’t someone who knows nothing. An apprentice is someone willing to pay attention, have a go, take feedback and improve. That mindset should stay with us whether we’re starting our first job or leading an organisation.

Leaders have a responsibility here. It’s easy to tell a team that development matters while giving them no time to do it. It’s easy to send someone on a course and never ask what they learned or what they’ll do differently. It’s also easy to invite new ideas, then explain why every suggestion won’t work.

If we want to keep that apprentice’s enthusiasm alive, people need to know their questions are welcome. They need time to learn, room to think and the chance to put ideas into practice. They also need to see that those of us in charge are still learning too.

Perhaps we could all start by asking ourselves a few questions at the end of each month.

What caught my attention? What did I learn? Which question have I been too busy to explore? And what could I try differently?

The answers might lead to training. They might lead to a conversation or a small change in how we work. They might simply remind us to look at a familiar problem with fresh eyes.

There’s something freeing about accepting that we’ll always be apprentices in some part of our lives. We can be proud of what we know and still be excited by what we have yet to discover.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether we’ve completed enough CPD this year.

Perhaps it’s this:

Have we made enough room to keep learning, thinking and asking questions?

Cheers,

Noel