Starting my learning journey with my skills future credit
I embarked on my learning journey with NTUC as the organization is offering 90% off their courses before year end in a bid to get adults to upskill to meet the demands of the new year. As all Singaporeans are given skills future credit to utilize for training and development, I can see that the skills future initiative has made embracing changes socially normal.
Once norms are set from the top, the adoption of this initiative becomes quite normal nationwide. Furthermore, the utilization of these credits as a good deal comes with an expiration date to make upskilling by a certain time window even more urgent. To sweeten the deal, I am fortunate to meet a responsive course consultant who followed up promptly once I started signing up for the first class. Since she made the whole administration process seamless with simple and clear guide, I am quite decisive in getting started on all my classes.
As my personal schedule in November is cleared up, I thought that there is no better timing to start during the lull periods of my work. I welcome the change in routine as there is a role reversal for me. I find changing from teacher to student novel and refreshing. I like the idea of meeting my trainers and fellow trainees on Zoom in the comforts of my own and stay safe during the surge the Covid numbers in Singapore.
With a small class size, I feel that there are ample opportunities for class participation and interaction. Being in a fun learning environment makes learning in long blocks of time easier. There is an element where we can get to learn from each other’s life experience that makes the time well spent too if we were to return back to the practical side of work.
Why is that a need to understand technology changes
In my previous foundational agile class with Acesence, I learnt that we live in an era of double destruction caused by automation and Covid-19. With so many technological changes and the disruption to the economy brought on by the pandemic, I feel that there is an urgent need for a mindset change. I can see that there is a shift towards offering business courses in NTUC Learning Hub to complement my need to deepen my understanding of the new business models. Furthermore, I am glad that I can find that most courses are contemporary in nature. These contemporary courses are geared towards change transformation yet there are learner centric and easier to absorb.
As I have a preference towards understanding how the mind works, I chose classes that are quite psychological in nature too involving mindset changes. Since we are living in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, I am glad that I started my first course called Cultivating an Experimental Mindset. For the second course, I took digital marketing where I can see there is a rapid change in the advent of new digital techniques to cope with the rapid changes in consumer demands in e-commerce for example. For my third course, I took Business Canvas where there is a 9 steps process to business success and there are good comprehensive case studies from ride-sharing platforms to expresso.
The next milestone is taking my agile marketing class which confers an internationally recognized certificate. I am glad that in my Agile Marketing class, I am able to recap my previous learning of the VUCA world from my first class. I would like to share a video from the agile marketing course which makes the concept of VUCA really easy to understand as the visuals use similes to tell the story well.
. Here is a link to the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqQh9t-VLIY
From the video, we can see images of what VUCA represents. The videos are impeccable and I attempted to capture what VUCA means from the introductory part of the video.
Ambiguity is represented by bare trees branches somewhere during winter
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