I enjoy learning a lot and have been awed by great lecturers since my younger days. Having graduated with a Philosophy degree, it did boost my presence in the workplace as I have been blessed with great colleagues who often time asked me why I love what I studied. I remembered catching up with another department colleague with multiple years of corporate communications experience who had to prepare news stories for the organization. Back then, I often have to contribute human interest stories from my volunteer programme for his work. It helped built a good bridge as a fresh graduate with older more experienced colleagues. Whenever we have lunch to break the mundaneness of collaborating, I recounted my fascination with philosophy and we often have endless conversations about topics outside of work hence strengthening inter-departmental relationship.
When I moved to the health/community care sector, it became an ice breaker with colleagues to make sense of the ground with regards to the healthcare policies. And till this day, I’ve often discussed many interesting themes of philosophy ranging from ethics to epistemology to makes sense of medical social work.
Philosophy
Ever wondered what is Philosophy?
Philia + Sophia = Philosophy
Philosophy is actually made up of two ancient Greek words where ‘philia’ means friend or lover of wisdom. A philosopher is thus a lover of wisdom who wants to pursue his or her knowledge and understanding through pursuing wisdom and acquiring ‘wisdom’.
I am glad I had gone through the process of loving knowledge and bringing it to the workplace. Fast forward today, when I started teaching my own students, I often felt that I needed to sharpen my skills as a teacher and believe in the need to upskill.
So far, I have completed close to 30 certificates and diplomas after I started less than a year ago. This is not a difficult feat as I have put in consistent effort by pacing myself. The E-learning courses enables the learners to use a setting where they can remind themselves to study whenever they could. I would like to share the three benefits of upskilling.
1.Upskilling adds value to your clients
In the teaching field, I often have to keep ahead of the latest news as I have to prepare my students sufficiently to acquire enough vocabulary. Being interested in acquiring knowledge and sharing your love for learning is one of the best role model I can be to my students. The end result is that unmotivated students start to acquire the love for learning. Being a subject specialist, it can be evident that students who come from a different cultural background start to like learning the English Language. The intangible reward is that their life becomes more interesting as I found out that my student who was reluctant to know the English Language want to learn more about action movies in his free time.
2. Upskilling boost your confidence
After being in the workplace for some time, I often feel that we can get stuck in a rut. When I started a new role where I have to come into close contact with clients, I signed up for a counselling and psychotherapy class. As the nature of the job requires face to face contact, it is good to know some counselling techniques to approach clients and ask appropriate probing questions and display empathetic responses to their problem situations. Upskilling provided intangible benefits such as the reward of clients trusting you with their personal issues from physical ailments to mental health. Overall, upskilling, boost one’s confidence as I have to adapt to a different work culture and social norms in a healthcare setting.
3. Upskilling bridges the skills gap
There is often a gap between the work we do and the jobs that are growing in demand in the different sectors ranging from digital technology to healthcare. With the changes in technology, there is often a need to bridge the gap for the new world of work. With the proliferation of many learning platform such as NTUC, it is easy to learn new trending skills like agile methodology to digital marketing.
Recently, I signed up for Cultivating an Experimental Mindset as I wanted to learn from a reputable adult institution. This proves to be beneficial as I will be in contact with adult learners from diverse background and put in a new environment away from my typical world with students. I get to learn from the adult perspective on how they perceive failure.
In the Singapore context, failure is kind of a setback where there is a fear of it. Hence, the course sets us up to see failure from a different angle instead where we start seeing taking steps to try a new venture as experimental. I believe there is a widespread fear of failure among Singaporeans as a culture and the course seeks to address that by cultivating an experimental mindset where we see failure as only a learning process. It is inspiring to also have case studies and group work where we work on our own failures. The assessment puts us all on the edge as it brings out the Singaporean’s fear of failing exam. Indeed, I get to see how our culture has been quite negative with experimenting in the area of entrepreneurship. I was inspired by Alibaba’s founder who sets an example of how he persisted and believed in his start-up despite receiving multiple rejections at the start. It is good to emerge with positive thinking regarding how to overcome the volatile, uncertain, ambiguous and complex world.
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