Experience and Career Growth

One of my colleagues in class wrote about the experience and using experience to help with career growth. It was an interesting discussion and it made me think about one primary aspect of our leadership classes. 

As I read it, I was glad she was focusing on “experience” as a part of pivoting and career change in adult development. I underlined several parts of the reading about that aspect of development. What we tend to see in my organization is that experiences are not shared to the degree that we wish within the industry we support. 

Many times, some of the most relevant and worthwhile experiences are colored over or covered up. An organization that I used to work for had a fatality back in the early 2010’s. A field guy was working with some tools and there was a high-pressure explosion from the tool that killed him. Our leadership made the decision to be as open as possible, both internally and to outside organizations, about what happened so that the entire contracting community could learn from our organization's mistakes. 

I see that same thing happening more and more in our industry. In our leadership training, we deliberately try to coax experiences from our learners so that the entire class can learn from their stories. In my position I don’t get to train or facilitate as much as I used to, what I find myself doing instead is training our trainers and facilitators. One huge challenge for many of our newer facilitators is the difficulty they have in turning off the “training” side of the brain, where they tell the class what they should know, and turning on their “allow the class to train one another through stories about their own personal experiences” side of their brain. 

It’s a tough jump to go from training to facilitating, particularly if you’ve “trained” for decades and decades. They want to fill the silence with teaching. They want to move the class along. The challenge I find is helping them realize that if they turn the class over to the students, let them talk about their experiences, then the content is far richer, the stories are more impactful since they are coming from other field leaders, and the learning that they take away from the class is more long-lasting. 

So I guess my point would be that experiences in Adult Development, it seems to me, play not only a personal part in helping adults chart or change careers, but can also have a fairly powerful tangential impact on others who might here or share those experiences.