How to Dream
Join globally renowned author and Columbia Business School professor Dr. Sheena Iyengar as she explains how to approach your dreams with a new perspective. Learn to reflect on what you long to accomplish and what stands in your way.
Strategy: Creating Value Inside Your Company
Have you ever wondered why certain companies are more successful than others? The answer is strategy: internal processes that control costs, allocate resources, and create value. This course from GLOBIS Unlimited can give you the tools you need for that strategic edge.
A career isn’t a one-and-done achievement.
When you’re young, it may seem like the goal is graduating and getting hired—or even climbing the ladder to a managerial level. But the truth is, the world is constantly changing around us. There are geopolitical shifts, environmental crises, changes in consumer interests, and advances in technology that will all impact your strategy and value in the future of work.
Strategy: Creating Value Inside Your Company
Have you ever wondered why certain companies are more successful than others? The answer is strategy: internal processes that control costs, allocate resources, and create value. This course from GLOBIS Unlimited can give you the tools you need for that strategic edge.
Not to mention, people change over time. What you were passionate about ten years ago may not be part of your personal mission today.
That’s why everyone’s favorite professional development terms today are “upskilling” and “reskilling.”
Upskilling is the process of continued skill development, whether it’s for yourself or for your team. But as an adult, upskilling can be a lot tougher than your early childhood education may have been. Back then, all you had to do was make the grade, then head home for dinner. But now you have a whole life to lead: work to attend to, relationships to maintain, and bills to pay. How do you balance all that and find the time for learning and development?
Jake Pratley, a lecturer at GLOBIS University, says setting a career trajectory can help. A learning trajectory aligns your skills gap, upskilling efforts, and career goals to help you maintain motivation. In this excerpt from his GLOBIS Unlimited course, “Developing a Learning Trajectory,” he explains why an upskilling strategy requires goals to keep up the momentum.
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Learning trajectories are all about the goal.
Jake Pratley: When you talk about a learning trajectory, really, really think about, “Where are we now? Where do we want to be in the future?” And then, “What is the path? What are the steps that we can take in the short- and mid-term in order to achieve those long-term goals?”
The last is something that we really need to be mindful of when we start learning something. Is this something that aligns with the learning trajectory that we had in mind, or is this a kind of new path that we want to go and explore?
How to Dream
Join globally renowned author and Columbia Business School professor Dr. Sheena Iyengar as she explains how to approach your dreams with a new perspective. Learn to reflect on what you long to accomplish and what stands in your way.
There might be some people out there who maybe just set short-term goals and, you know, just kind of wing it as they go. So maybe, “Start studying something, start learning something, maybe then jump to the next thing.” And this might be okay. You know, maybe you enjoy this. Maybe you’re gaining some very useful practical skills.
But then we need to think about which is better. Is it better to do it this way and be very, very flexible? Or is it better to align our learning to a longer-term goal?
I would argue that it is important to think about the long term and think about the direction that we want to head. And the reason for that is this: Learning can be very, very hard. Often it’s very enjoyable, very fun. But anyone who’s tried to learn something knows that sometimes it’s unpleasant or uncomfortable. So how can we push through that barrier if we don’t have a kind of long-term vision or goal set out?
Upskilling means staying the course.
Pratley: Once we hit challenges, it’s going to be very easy for us to drop off and then switch to something else. So I think if you really want to achieve something meaningful, it’s very important to have that long-term vision. Have those goals so that we can align our short-term actions with them.
As an example from my own personal experience, I could talk about the GLOBIS MBA. You can start learning an MBA and then it gets very, very difficult. You have to kind of balance. I did mine part-time, so I was working full-time and studying in the evenings and on weekends.
Sometimes when you’re very busy, you’re very pushed at work, or you can be tempted to take the foot off the pedal, relax a little bit, and maybe not prepare so much for this or that upcoming class. You’ll see how you go and just start to hit the minimal level.
That’s where having a learning trajectory defined for yourself can be really useful. The objective becomes something bigger. It’s not just getting through this next class or achieving a grade. It’s about really gaining the knowledge that you need to achieve your bigger goal.
For my MBA program, I had big goals that I’d set: I want to be successful in these areas in business. And so thinking about that made me understand that it’s not enough to just do the minimum level in class. I need to actually apply myself, challenge myself. Only then was I going to be able to get the skills that I needed to achieve those bigger goals that I’d set for myself.
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