Learn, Practice, Repeat

Here are my 3 take-aways from this week's conversation: 

1. Due diligence
The jobortunity idea took 2 years to come to life. Between the inception of the idea and the implementation were days of research, travel, asking questions--all to fully understand the problem she was going to solve. It pays off to fully understand the problem you are seeking to solve...keeps you focused and your solutions relevant (in Jobortunity's case, highly interactive personalized experiential training). That said, there are bound to be setbacks and unexpected turns early in the establishment of a business or organization. However, fully understanding your value proposition positions you better to learn from these setbacks and diversions from the main plan just as Kim and her team embraced the chaos of that first year itch.


2. When it comes to nurturing company culture, practice what you preach (talking to you, founders and leaders)
When it came to building the Jobortunity culture through its growth, Jobortunity took advantage of its own product (the high 5 approach) and used it to guide how people are to relate to one another. This consistency in expectations influenced employee engagement where everyone on the team is involved in the strategic planning meetings and as a side effect, everyone is on the same page when it comes to executing plans. Some could be said on the role of the size of the company in making this possible, but research does indicate that practicing culture is possible in all sizes of organization and is often associated with higher profitability.


3. Learning should be engaging
Jobortunity graduates truly learn and later use what they’ve learned when they go out on their own and a large part of this transfer of learning is the fact that the learning is carefully designed to teach beyond knowledge. Learning in the workplace is tedious and challenging. Some employees feel they already know all there is to know about their field while others feel that there’s simply too much to do to fit in learning. Learning for the most part has turned into a compliance issue and training is often boring. Unfortunately, that’s a waste of everyone’s time. For learning at work to amount to any semblance of ROI, it must be memorable, engaging, useful, and most importantly, be applied. Jobortunity achieves all that by carefully designing learning experiences.

Learn more about Jobortunity at jobortunity.org

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