Life Long Learning
Feb 9, 2012
My oldest son, John, just started his full-time career after finishing his master’s in Computer Science from Virginia Tech. I gave him my standard advice he has heard more than a few times:
- Life is short.
- Death is certain.
- If you don’t make your own decisions now, time will make them for you.
My specific career advice to my son is that you must be in a lifelong learning mode if you want to always stay highly employable – no matter what your field.
This might be advice that you feel is stating the obvious, but have you honestly assessed your worth in the market in the past 6 months? Have you interviewed in the past 6 months? What percent of your time was spent learning a brand new skill last year? Companies like Sun Microsystems used to invest 10 to 12 percent of their revenue on research and development. How much does your company invest in R&D? Are you working for a thought leader or a follower? How much money and time does your company invest in you every year? How much of your own money do you invest in your lifelong learning each and every year?
I spend a lot of my time working with MTConnect and MTInsight. MTConnect is the open and royalty-free protocol that is radically changing manufacturing by making it easy to connect manufacturing equipment to applications. MTInsight is the game-changing business- intelligence tool that companies must have to succeed in manufacturing today. There are great examples of the importance of lifelong learning with both MTConnect and MTInsight.
Pat McGibbon is VP of Strategic Information & Research and Membership for AMT - The Association For Manufacturing Technology. Pat runs MTInsight. He makes a very important point when it comes to how the skill sets of his staff have changed over the years. On more than one occasion I have heard Pat state that it used to be that understanding the ins and outs of spreadsheets might be the extent of technical knowledge he would expect from a new hire. Now, the skill sets of those in SIR have expanded to include Business Intelligence (BI), SQL, JavaScript and analytics in the cloud, to name just a few. Pat invests in his people not because he is a nice guy (he is) but because he is a smart businessman who understands the importance of investing in his people. Employees who are always learning and improving their skill sets are happier and more productive. MTInsight won Actuate’s 2011 Business Intelligence Reporting Tool Excellence Award this past year, so the results of investing in your people speak for themselves.
In the Emerging Technology Center at IMTS 2010, I had a very interesting conversation with a gentleman who entered the ETC looking for me. When I introduced myself, he then proceeded to say that he was not happy with me. I was immediately puzzled, as we had never met. He then explained that he made his living writing low-level drivers for machine tools to speak to applications, and if MTConnect catches on, he will be out of work! I responded, “You must really be upset with the U.S. government as well then.” He then looked puzzled at me.and I smiled saying, “The U.S. government no longer provides economic support for buggy whip makers, so that must really upset you as well.”
We then had a discussion about MTConnect. He was a software developer so he immediately understood the technical side. I shared some statistics with him like in the year 1790, 93% of Americans were farmers. We needed that 93% to feed all Americans. Today, that number is .68%. Not 68%, but .68%, and it is estimated we could feed another half billion people around the globe on top of that. One could argue that farm automation led to the Internet. If we still had to have 93% of all Americans farming, that would limit us severely on new opportunities.
After he agreed that change could provide opportunity, we discussed the many business opportunities of MTConnect. I explained that when you can easily network your manufacturing floor, what is the first thing shop owners or plant managers want to do? Monitor what’s going on. He agreed. What is the second thing they will want to do? Integrate the shop floor information into other systems. He also agreed with that premise. I gave him a lot of information and he thanked me.
The next day he returned to the ETC and said, “I thought about what you said regarding new opportunities with MTConnect. It can open up new opportunities for me that will likely be more profitable than what I am doing today.” He then asked for information on joining MTConnect.
When I think of lifelong learning, I think of the famous Charles Darwin quote: “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.”
