What is your learning style?

No, not your dress sense – I’m referring to what is your learning style. Why? Because when it comes to your personal professional development – it matters.

Matching the right learning approach to what is your learning style pays real dividends. It accelerates your learning, makes applying it in your day-to-day role much easier, and is far more enjoyable!

Have you found yourself plodding through an online learning package and thinking, “When will it ever end?” or “This is just wasting my time”, and deciding it’s useless. Actually it may not be the package – it may just be that you are an ‘activist‘ or ‘pragmatist’ when it comes to learning.

Or, perhaps you’ve taken part in a ‘live’ situation workshop and found that there isn’t time to assimilate all the information and make it meaningful – making the workshop seem poorly planned and of little value to you. It may be that in fact the problem lies not with the workshop but that you are an individual that has a ‘theorist’ or ‘reflector’ approach to learning – and the approach adopted is just not right for you.

Unless you are aware of Honey and Mumford’s work in 1986 the ‘activist’ and ‘theorist’ labels may not mean much, but bear with me a moment longer. Can you recognise yourself in any of the following statements?

If you can see yourself in one of the above then you have already taken your first step towards understanding what is your learning style. Your ‘likes’ suggest the type of learning that is likely to work best for you. I have added a few ideas to start you thinking.

And of course you can mix and match:

• activists and pragmatists often make great coaches by sharing practical examples
• theorists and reflectors make great networkers.

To make the most of what is your learning style and development opportunities, wherever possible, try using an approach that matches your preferred style, for at least part of your development.

Of course I realise you can’t always pick and choose when it comes to learning, but where you can, as far as possible, think about the type of person you are, your style and what will be the most effective for you.   And where you can’t – improvise!

For example, you are on a formal course.  If you are a reflector make sure you spend time on the way home or in the evening thinking about what you have learned.  If you’re a pragmatist spend time thinking about which elements will work for you and you will share with your colleagues.  Make it work for you!

And finally, as you can see from the examples above, there is a much wider choice out there than perhaps you had considered and there really is something for everyone – particularly when you consider  the ‘experience based’ approaches which are becoming more readily available.

If you disagree, or would like to extend the debate, please drop me a line.  You can contact me at: jnichols@citi.co.uk

Below you can access some of my other blogs written on similar and related topics: