Career chats: Why professionals never stop learning
About this video
Four professionals explain why they never stop learning. One earned a CPA while working, a cybersecurity worker says you must keep up with new technology or burn out, a banker kept moving to more complex types of loans, and another compares learning to breathing: after reaching a goal you inhale and learn again.
You'll be able to
- explain why professionals keep learning throughout their careers.
- give examples of how continued learning leads to promotions or new opportunities.
- explain the breathing analogy for lifelong learning.
Key words
- CPA
- Certified Public Accountant, a professional qualification for accountants.
- cybersecurity
- Protecting computers, networks and data from attacks.
- stagnate
- To stop growing or improving.
- burn out
- To become exhausted and lose motivation, often from stress at work.
- analogy
- A comparison that explains one idea using another, more familiar idea.
Transcript
(gentle upbeat music) - Would definitely be never stop learning. During my tenure at my previous company, even though I was working, I did my CPA simultaneously. And that led to a lot of promotions for me.
- You really have to be passionate about cybersecurity, 'cause again, you have to keep up with the latest news, and have to be very interested in it, and be willing to learn, and learn new things, 'cause you can't stagnate, you can't just kinda coast. You have to learn the new technology as it comes out.
Otherwise you're gonna be really frustrated very quickly, and you're gonna burn out very, very quickly.
- You gotta always be learning. You know, never sit there and go, "Oh, I know how to do everything." Try to find a new skill. Try to find a new thing to learn. Like in the banking world, you know, I did loans for small businesses, and then I started doing real estate loans, and then I started doing construction loans for that real estate.
And then I said, "You know what? I know how to do this. Let me figure out something else." And then I started doing, you know, affordable housing tax credit deals, which are very complex. And as long as you keep learning in your career and staying persistent in that, it's gonna pay major dividends in the end.
- And I was like, "I made it." And it was one week later that I was like, "Oh my goodness, I'm overwhelmed." And so I had to learn things again, and I had to look for opportunities again, right? And so the analogy here is breathing. And the lesson I learned is, you know, just because you're building up to a goal, and you get that goal, and then you have this big sigh of relief, "Oof," that doesn't mean you're done.
It means you have to breathe again, inhale again, and learn until you reach your next goal. And then you breathe out, and. (gentle upbeat music)
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