Worth reading, about the CURE (Cross-skilling, Up-skilling, Re-skilling and Expert-skilling) and the cycle of Learning, Unlearning and Relearning in today's Fourth Industrial Revolution!

Q&A: What You Need to Know about Skilling, Upskilling, Reskilling, Deskilling, Cross-skilling, Learning, Unlearning and Relearning 

Continuing from an earlier post on  THE PARAMETERS OF THE LEARNING ECONOMY: LEARNING AND SKILLING, Dilip Mukerjea writes in his new book, Learning How to Learn (not yet released; still in the works; this is a sneak preview!):

Innovating Innovation 

A 3Cs strategy can serve as a foundation for shaping opportunities to create significant value: 

Consider, Create, Consolidate. 

Consider what to focus upon, 

Create possibilities out of your focal options, via smart techniques, then 

Consolidate the decisions and actions that emerge from your considerations and creations. 

They integrate strategic, operational and organisational initiatives into pragmatic skills to deliver near-term performance improvement and longer-term capability building. 

Today, most of the world’s brilliant people are not members of any single team but are distributed all over the planet in diverse institutions. Increasingly, innovations occur at the interstices between different disciplines — between, for example, biotech and nano technologies, genetics and robotics, information and telecommunications. 

Organisations need to find ways to leverage the disparate intellectual assets of people who see the world differently and who use unique tools and methods. Such people are likely to work both in different disciplines and in different institutions. 

Discovering and leveraging successful ways to work with them will lie at the heart of innovating innovation. 

Today’s computers have the power to simulate massively complex, nonlinear systems, coupled to phenomenal visualisation techniques; they enable the customer to be brought ever closer to the design process. 

Two principal sources of learning are: 

‘learning by doing’ — via actions and interactions, and ‘learning while waiting’ — what is discovered from markets during product development. 

Keep learning in both modes, so as to stay current, creative, and competitive. Innovation is transforming the business landscape. 

The global economy is characterised by intensifying competition. New relationships will emerge from ‘accelerated capability building’, widely believed to be the most powerful source of strategic advantage. Scan the edges of business ecosystems, and explore the core of corporate consciousness, to discover catalysts for creative capability building. 

LEARNING UNLEARNING RELEARNING REBUILDING 

This is a four-step cycle that we experience from infancy, but without elaborate prior knowledge. But as adults, we must reframe our consciousness and understand what these steps mean and the value inherent in them: 

Learning can take place through formal education or informal training. 

Formal education involves attending classes and studying books while informal training takes place when someone teaches us something by example. 

Unlearning means letting go of old habits and ways of thinking that are no longer relevant. This happens naturally over time as we mature and gain experience. 

However, sometimes we need to consciously unlearn bad habits and negative beliefs. 

Relearning is similar to unlearning except that instead of letting go of old habits, we replace them with positive ones. When we re-learn something, 

We use the same knowledge base but apply it differently. For example, if you were good at math before, you might find yourself using different strategies to solve problems today.

It is necessary to learn, unlearn and relearn at any stage in life, but in the modern professional context, it calls upon us to consistently revamp our skills and upgrade our knowledge so as to keep pace with the rapidly changing world. This cycle enable us to expand our horizons, change our paradigms, and transform our possibilities. 

As long as we keep growing, we will continue to move forward towards achieving our goals.It provides us with valuable insights into how to deal with challenges and obstacles along the way. It keeps us sharp and relevant. 

With age comes wisdom and maturity. But without learning, we would remain immature forever. It improves communication skills, without which, we cannot effectively lead teams, manage projects, negotiate deals, persuade clients, influence stakeholders, and lead a fulfilling life. 

This cycle then upscales through a synthesis that enables us to re-build out status quo, and advance well into the distant future. 

Shift. Learn. Transform. 

This is the triunity of experiences that comprise the dynamics in our quest for the best.

Dilip Mukerjea writes in his new book, Learning How to Learn (still in the works; to be released shortly; this is a sneak preview!):

THE PARAMETERS OF THE LEARNING ECONOMY: LEARNING AND SKILLING

Within the churn of ever-changing and volatile technological trends, the only way professionals and organisations can sustain themselves is through the cycle of lifelong “Learning, Unlearning and Relearning.” 

This discipline must be complemented by the heartbeat of the acronym “CURE”: 

1. Cross-Skilling: 

Learning skills from domains other than their core, to perform beyond existing roles and responsibilities. Professionals should be able to work on multiple technologies rather than having mastery over just one technology to do justice to the constantly evolving job roles and responsibilities and volatile work environments. 

Additionally, cross-skilling helps professionals gain a better understanding of the process from start to finish. This boosts job satisfaction as well. 

2. Up-Skilling: 

In light of exponential, technological advances, professionals have to regularly upskill through undiminishing regimes of learning and development. Hands-on practice and application are needed now more than ever to upskill and be proficient in new skills being acquired, and further skills demanding attention. 

3. Re-Skilling: 

Today’s technologies, and those that are emerging within the accelerating future, have a short shelf-life. As a result, professionals need to enable themselves to constantly keep learning new skills, so as to stay relevant to current trends and abreast of marketspace demands; Re-skilling helps professionals sharpen their business acumen, their critical, creative, and systems thinking skills, and exponentially raises their employability quotient. 

4. Expert-Skilling: 

While cross-skilling is the spreading of one’s skillset breadth-wise, expert skilling is going deep, much deeper. Attaining hands-on experience in technologies while solving real-world problems under the guidance of industry experts has been the standard way of learning. A thorough expertise refers to a project well taken care of. 

Experts at technology are seen as assets to organisations. The scaling in companies is another issue – whether it is down-scaling or up-scaling, the professional who is cross-skilled, up-skilled, expert-skilled or re-skilled is expected to thrive! 

In summary, as professionals embrace the CURE concept and practice, their organisations will breed future business adaptiveness, agility, and resilience! 

Today, we are in The Learning Economy! The creative brain capital resident within a nation’s citizenry will determine the emergence of winners in an ecosystem of stampeding idea-brokers. 

We are in a “VUCANT“ world, where Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity, Novelty, and Turbulence prevail: game-changing challenges compel us to continually think, learn, and create, in unreal time, so that we move ahead from volatility to vision, uncertainty to understanding, complexing to clarity, ambiguity to agility, novelty to noteworthiness, and turbulence to tranquillity. 

This means that we must be able to: 

• convert information into usable intelligence. 

• come up with simple solutions to complex problems. 

• understand and appreciate that true TQM equates directly with effective brain and heart usage.

The corporations that survive in the long term will be those with “smart teams” that are able to think quick, move fast, manoeuvre 

The corporations that survive in the long term will be those with “smart teams” that are able to think quick, move fast, manoeuvre  flexibly, and are more focused through the medium of “relaxed alertness.” 

The possession of knowledge alone, without subsequent application, will produce a pundit rather than a practitioner. 

True knowledge resides in ultimately doing, not merely knowing about, and talking about.

Dilip Mukerjea writes in his new book (Learning How to Learn; still in the works; to be released shortly;  this is a sneak preview!):

Navigating the 4th Industrial Revolution 

Tapping into the brilliant observations pertaining to human evolution right up to the present state, Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), and author of the masterpiece Shaping the Future of The Fourth Industrial Revolution, awakens us to the crucial realities confronting us today. 

His conviction that today, we stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. It is monumental in its scale, scope, and complexity, whereby the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before. 

One thing is clear: the response to it must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society. 

The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanise production. 

The Second used electric power to create mass production.

The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. 

Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. 

He proffers three reasons why today’s transformations represent not merely a prolongation of the Third Industrial Revolution but rather the arrival of a Fourth and distinct one: velocity, scope, and systems impact. 

The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. 

In this Exponential Age, when compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance. 

The bedrock of this is education, and learning how to learn! 

“We must develop a comprehensive and globally shared view of how technology is affecting our lives and reshaping our economic, social, cultural, and human environments. There has never been a time of greater promise, or greater peril.” ~ Klaus Schwab;

It's good to know about them, as they are an integral part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution!!