The 'No Learning' Employee

An employee everywhere is mostly categorized as either satisfied or unsatisfied and there goes the entire talent development team busy trying to build the environment that engages the employee and converts him to a satisfied breed.

Then there is another classification that labels employees as somebody either landing up on a job or making a well intentioned move towards professional growth. The former ones couldn’t fathom anything better, or just weren’t interested in previous occupations. Overtime exposure allows them to master the attitude and skills required for the profile. The latter ones have been living each moment of their wake hours wondering how to grab the opportunity and reach the zenith of success.

So far so good, there’s the ‘Yin and Yang’ of the taxonomy of the mental frame of an employee. The unbalance occurs when the consequences of a confused mental frame brings about a third category. Those of them, who have been engaged on a particular job for good number of years, have struggled in their lives to reach to that point and upon reflection of how the journey with the job has been – give a blunt answer - “haven’t learnt anything on the job”.

In fact I have personally come across people who try their best at acquiring worldly knowledge about all skills that can be remotely associated with their profile. For example if John was a wood cutter; he can always say he’s good at wooden sculpture and carpentry too. In technology terms a VB DotNet professional, within no time can portray his exposure on ASP DotNet and C# DotNet technologies; nevermind he was stuck for good with VB. There’s always that quest to show how much one knows about things happening around. Yet they always feel they’ve not learnt even an ounce from their current profile.

Such employees are hard to address, as they live in a make-belief world where the external attracts them and grasses always look greener the other side. However, the way they look at their current profiles is an inside-out reflection of how they perceive about themselves. The graduation friends’ profile is always more lucrative. The peers task is always more interesting. The colleague in another project has the best learning curve. The manager elsewhere gives the best opportunity. Best lies everywhere, but where you lay your hands! If this is the case, do whatever, you’d always be the one not learning!

The best such employees can do is find a job where they truly believe they can learn something or if they think that’s what they want in life, they need to learn the art of appreciating how the smallest of the experiences can be the biggest of the lessons. Further, never disregard the period they’ve been associated with the profile or the company. One may deserve a better profile and may have conceptualized a better opportunity for oneself; however, before this, one never knew how it would be like being here!