Why Learning Is Quietly Getting Harder

A few years ago, the OECD put together a project [music] team to try to figure out what the most important skills of the future are going to be. This team was led by internationally renowned [music] uh researchers and policy analysts and they worked in partnership with dozens of institutions and industry leaders. And what this report said is that learning to learn and higher order of thinking skills is one of the most important skills to be successful in [music] the future. This next part is the part that I really think is valuable for you to understand. Right now, there are three very important shifts that are happening in the learning and professional landscape. And these shifts have massive implications in terms of how you need to be learning, what you need to be upskilling with, and what your job is going to look like moving forward. You need to understand these three shifts. Otherwise, you will just be left behind. And these three shifts are number one, the skills shift. [music] Number two, the goalpost shift. And number three, the readiness gap shift. So let me explain these. The first one is the skills shift. Whatever skills you have right now, whatever you're good at right now, a few years from now, that is not going to be enough. And when I say a few years from now, some people think, well, I've got years of time. Well, remember it takes years to build skills. This phenomenon is a fact. There's a number of reports that have come up from places like Gallup or LinkedIn over the last couple of years. And what it's shown is that over the last 3 years, the skills that are required to get a job and be competitive in the workforce have changed by 25 to 30%. In other words, roughly a quarter to a third of all the skills that used to be important to get a job and be successful in your career are no longer important and have been replaced by a new set of skills. And that has happened over 3 years. So if you start a university degree, by the time you graduate, a quarter to a third of everything that normally would have helped you get a job is not going to help you anymore. Now, if a quarter to a third isn't enough for you, LinkedIn thinks that this number is going to go up over the next few years to 65 to 70%. So, think about all the skills you have right now, which you probably accumulated over many years. Now, imagine that most of those skills are not valued by employers anymore. And now the common response to this phenomenon is okay I need to figure out what the next big in- demand set of skills are. If I can spend my time upskilling on those things that's going to give me safety. That is not the correct answer because the skills are not just changing one off. A few years from now it'll change again and it'll change again and it'll change again. Life as a working professional means you are constantly upskilling to remain competitive. And honestly, even as a learning coach, like I teach people how to learn for a living. Even from my perspective, I think that kind of sucks. That's a lot of pressure. And you know, unfortunately, it's just an unforgiving world out there. But the mistake I see a lot of professionals making, even the ones that I'm working with are that they have this idea that as soon as they just learn the next set of skills, that's going to give them security. But it's not. You have to realize that you're constantly going to be learning. You're constantly going to be upskilling. What you need to be able to do is learn and upskill very fast in a way that's sustainable. A lot of people I work with are working full-time [music] and on the side they're also going back to uni, doing a masters, doing a certification or just learning things on the side and it's stretching them thin. They don't have time for family. They don't have time for hobbies. They the question is how long can you maintain that for? Cuz you're going to have to maintain that for the rest of your life. Whatever competitive disadvantage you feel right now that you're falling behind on, that feeling [music] is not going to go away unless you're able to run faster than the landscape is changing. And that comes down to your ability to learn. As long as your ability to learn new skills is slower than the rate of those skills changing, this feeling, the insecurity, that constant need to be on this hamster wheel, that's not going to go away. And it gets worse. I'm sorry, but it gets worse. The reality is that that's only the first shift. The second shift is the goalpost shift. When I talk to people about how they're using AI and how AI is helping them, it's very exciting and a lot of people really enjoy the fact that these things that used to take them, you know, 10 15 days before now they can do in a single afternoon by using AI. It's cut out a lot of the TDM. It's streamlined a lot of flows. It's freed up a lot of their time. But the ironic thing is that that's actually made it harder at work. Their jobs have actually become more difficult as AI has made it easier. And this is because of the goalpost shift. Some of you are already feeling this at work. Some of you haven't felt it yet, but it's coming. The goalpost shift is the expectation set on you by your employer. And if not, if you don't have an employer, you're an entrepreneur, you're self-employed, it's going to be set on you by the market itself. Employers [music] are now demanding more from their employees. They understand that AI is meant to make things faster and more efficient and and sometimes they frustratingly don't really understand the limitations of it, but there is an expectation that you can do more in the time that they're paying you for. If previously it was accepted that it would take a couple weeks for you to output something, now that same output should be done within one week, 2 days. And it's [music] not simply a matter of, okay, well, I used to legitimately spend 2 weeks on doing this to create this output and now I legitimately can do that in 2 days. So, at the end of the day, I'm not any more or less busy. In fact, it's a good thing. I'm able to produce more meaningful output. And that's a great way of thinking about things. Except in reality, it's actually not that simple. And one of the big reasons is that the parts that AI is helping to speed up for you were probably the parts that were timeconuming but easy. They were mentally not that challenging. Might have taken a lot of time, might have been very tedious. But the things that AI struggles with doing right now, bringing lots of pieces together, creating strategy, creating context, dealing with these really nuanced things for complicated decisions and solving complex problems. That stuff which is the hardest part of your job that takes the most amount of mental energy and concentration and focus which used to only be 20% of your job is now 80% of your job. AI has bust open that bottleneck so wide the bottleneck is now all concentrated on you and your ability to perform and pull it all together and make it work. So when I talk to professionals and I'm talking to people all sorts of different occupations, every industry all around the world and I have hours of these conversations every single week. They are actually telling me that there is more pressure on them at work. Even though they are objectively more efficient, it is taking more of a toll on them. So overall right now as a as a modern professional in this kind of AI world, it's a tough place to be. Thank God it doesn't get worse than this. It does. And that's the third issue. This third shift is the readiness gap. The readiness gap is basically the standard that is given to you, the goalpost from your employer or your task or your project compared to your level of current ability and confidence. And here's the thing is that the standard you need to reach this is dictated a lot by the market by just the competitive landscape. Whereas your ability is driven by your training, your university and just your own level of experience. And here's the issue. This improves slowly. Most organizations do not do much in the way of training. A recent report from Deote found that only 5% of employers believe that they're investing enough in training. And in a November 2024 report by Gallup, only 45% of employees in the US even participated in any training for their job. And even when you do go to this training in terms of how effective it really is at upskilling you, if you've ever done any of this professional training, you know that it can be hit or miss. In fact, when you look at all of these reports from all these different organizations, one of the strongest, most consistent themes that keeps coming up is the sentiment of I don't feel like I am upskilling and being trained enough to do the job I need to do. And this is not surprising to anyone. Uh I had a pretty candid conversation a few years ago when I was in New York with one of the senior leaders of a pretty large investment banking firm. I was asking them what their training and learning and development uh routine is like and they just straight up said we just don't have anything. They said there's a steep learning curve and you can either do your job and you can learn how to do your job or you can't and if you can't we'll just find someone who can. Pretty brutal. And even institutions that we believe are meant to be helping us be ready and be prepared like universities, even though they have good intentions, it's going to take them years to adapt and figure out how to train graduates in a world where using AI is the norm, where the metrics of success are no longer what knowledge and skills do you have by the time you graduate or did you get a job after graduating and instead [music] it's how good are you at acquiring new knowledge and skills [music] and what happens after you get your first job. Can you keep up? Can you adapt? Can you succeed in that career? And now obviously the goalpost is moving very very quickly cuz there's nothing stopping it from moving quickly. And so the gap between our ability and what we are ready and trained and prepared for and what we need it to be. This gap is constantly widening and it's widening very fast. People will lose jobs because of this. And I don't take any joy in in predicting this because these are real people with real families and real responsibilities who work hard and did all the right things and they're going to be out of a job. So here's the message and takeaway about this whole readiness gap thing. The gap is widening and it's up to you to bridge it. Do not rely on someone else to bridge this for you. Do not rely on your employer to train you to do this. Do not rely on your universities to get you ready for this. The gap is there. The gap is widening. Do not be blind to it. See it for what it is and do your best to bridge it yourself. And right now you have an advantage because this video is going to be it's going to get like 100,000 views maybe. I don't know. Most people do not think about AI and the impact on their jobs. They don't think about the employment landscape in this way. They're not seeing and understanding these shifts. And they think about learning to learn as like a curiosity. Oh, an interesting thing. Maybe I'll spend some time doing that one day. But right now, you after watching this video, you know that learning to learn is a priority. That you have to learn to learn. And this is an opportunity for you, a competitive advantage. Just like how if you decided to learn Python and machine learning 5 years ago, now you're in a great place. A few years from now, when all the skills that you need are constantly changing every few years, people are going to realize they need to learn skills and knowledge faster. And if you're the person that spent that time over the next few years really honing in on this skill, you are going to take the lead. [music] So what do you do now? You have this realization. You know that learning to learn is important. How do you turn that realization into something practical and meaningful so that you actually improve your learning on a daily basis in your busy professional life? Well, I have a few recommendations for you based on my years of experience coaching this. [music] Number one, and this might seem obvious to some of you, but it's not obvious to most. You need to realize that learning to learn is a skill. Learning is not just some magic phenomenon that happens in your brain. How fast and how well you learn is not something that's pre-ordained by your birth. You may be a terrible learner right now. You can get better. It is a skill that you can learn and you can train just like any other skill. But to be able to improve this skill, there are a few things that you're going to need. One of those things is actual knowledge. Take some time to learn about how learning works. Understand your brain. Yes, you can just try to generally reflect on your learning and try random things, but it is vastly more efficient to [music] just get good reliable information about how the brain works. Use strategies that are based on evidence. Spend the time to learn these things and then apply and experiment them in your daily life. And if you're looking to make that easier, I recommend my newsletter. This is a plug, but it's also genuinely what I recommend. When I write these newsletters, by the way, I if you don't know, I have these newsletters. I send them out. It's free. I send them out every single week. When I write these newsletters, I think about what are the things that 15 years ago I wish I had known. The things that took me years to figure out. I figured them out across, [music] you know, reading thousands of research papers and experimenting with them on myself. And I realized some things. I discovered more about how the brain works. I made a bunch of these mistakes and I try to communicate the learnings from those mistakes to you so that you don't have to make those same mistakes like I did. It took me a decade to really get good at learning. I don't want it to take a decade for you. I try to make each newsletter genuinely valuable with something practical that you can take away from that. So, if that's something that you are interested in, I'll leave a link to sign up to that newsletter. It'll be in the description below. Again, it's totally free. If you don't like it, you can unsubscribe at any time. Blah blah blah. So that's the first thing, knowledge. You need to have some kind of theory. [music] The second time, and again, this is going to be obvious, but like I really need to say it is that you need to actually put in some time and effort. Learning to learn has to become a priority that is important enough that you are scheduling time in your busy schedule to learn this, experiment with it, try out new things. If you want to become a professional tennis player and the only level of practice you get is just whatever break time you get at work, you're probably not going to become a professional tennis player. It's the same thing with learning to learn. Yes, [music] you're busy. I get it. I really do. I ran a business full-time while I was working as a junior doctor full-time. I did a 100hour weeks backtoback for years with personal and household responsibilities and some very challenging family situations. When you're really busy and you have to make time and you are so tired, it is hard. It sucks giving yourself extra work. But whatever profession you are, you are also a professional learner because your ability to maintain your profession depends on how well you can learn. And while I am constantly thinking about the fastest and easiest way to teach this skill and even though I can help someone improve 10 times faster than they normally would have, it's still takes time. And the point I want to make clear about this is that having knowledge and putting in time and effort, these are prerequisites. They're non-negotiables. If you do not acquire knowledge about how to learn, and if you do not prioritize having time and effort to practice and learn the skill, you will not learn this. You will not naturally just get better at learning with time and experience in a way that's actually significant or meaningful. Yes, you may pick up a tip or a trick here and there. It's [music] probably not going to be enough. It's not going to be enough to actually solve the problems you have. Your problems and your challenges are going to remain. So, that's the first thing. That's the first thing you can do. You can the first thing for you to do is to actually make the conscious decision to make this a priority. The second thing once you've decided that you're going to work on this is to put aside time for reflection. I see a lot of people who have made that decision and they're prioritizing this and they're learning about it. They're experimenting with different things and that's great. That that's more than most people, but they don't put in enough time to reflect on their experiments. Learning is a really complicated thing. Like it's a very complicated process in the brain. It's also invisible, which means that it's very hard to get feedback on how well you're going. And so even if there is a new strategy or a method that you're using, the chances that you can just take that strategy and then use it and it gets you the results that you want straight off the bat are very, very low. When you're learning to learn, you have to expect that you're going to be making mistakes and the strategies you're using are not going to be effective until you make them effective. That's different for everyone. Most of the improvement in a practical sense, the thing that really improves your ability to learn does not come from knowing about a strategy and trying a technique. It comes from trying it, seeing why it didn't work, reflecting and learning about your own processes and habits, and then making adjustments. And it's those continual little adjustments and self-realizations that make you a better learner. So to really get better at learning and feel like you're able to keep up with that overwhelming constant volume of work and new upskilling you need to do for your work, you have to make sure that your amount of reflection is balancing the amount of experimentation that you're doing. If you just make the decision to apply these two steps into your daily life already you will be ahead. And progress at first can be slow, but a year from now, there are going to be people who started this journey and people who didn't. As Virgil said, time passes irrevocably. And when that time passes, you got to ask yourself, what position do you want to be in? Now, if you want to dive a little bit more deeply into learning to learn, getting your hands dirty with some of that theory and what you can do with it, then I'd recommend watching this video where I break down the process of learning to learn in much more detail. And as I mentioned, there's also my newsletter which I send out for free every single week. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.

Join my Learning Drops newsletter (free): https://go.icanstudy.com/newsletter-oecdreport3shifts In this video, I break down the three critical shifts happening right now that are making learning harder than ever and what you need to do to stay ahead instead of falling behind. Take my Learning Diagnostic Quiz (free): https://go.icanstudy.com/diagnostic-oecdreport3shifts === Guided Training Program === I’ve distilled my 13 years of experience as a learning coach into a step-by-step program for developing learning skills. If you want to be able to master new knowledge and skills in half the time, check out: https://go.icanstudy.com/program-oecdreport3shifts === About Dr Justin Sung === Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, a certified teacher, a research author, and a former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.