Why you might not be learning in college the thing that you need most for your career

College is amazing. You learn great stuff. Yet they don’t teach you one of the most important things to get you ready for your career. The thing that would make an easily crossable bridge to your first job and to each role after that. Any guesses as to what it is?

I’m going to go out on a limb and assert that while the world of work has changed dramatically since I graduated from college, the way college prepares you for that world has not. And because the pace of change has accelerated almost beyond comprehension, mastering the art of experiential learning  - or learning by doing - might be the most important thing you could do in college. Over time, I’m going to show you exactly how to do just that. For now, let’s explore this idea and test it out.

As an undergraduate, for me it was mostly idea learning -- about concepts and stories that had been articulated by others in the past. Don’t get me wrong, this is a beautiful and important exercise, a valuable foundation and context setting for the thinking that you do in your adult life. And as part of this you are having experiences that are teaching you important skills - how to seek and synthesize data, form your own point of view with back up, meet deadlines, produce deliverables, form relationships. Maybe you even learn to cook, have internships, part-time jobs. Again, all hugely important. But.

I don’t think there is much focus on intentionally producing your own learning experiences and becoming skilled at learning from them. Why is this important? Learning agility, or the ability to integrate what you’ve learned in one situation and apply it readily to your next challenge, is the thing that will help you adapt quickly and be successful in new assignments, with new technologies (some of which have not even been invented yet), and facing new challenges. Learning agility will become more critical to your success as the world of work continues to evolve at a rapid rate and managing your own learning experiences is an effective way to expand and optimize your learning agility.

Learning agility is also one of the key things savvy executives look for to distinguish the top talent they consider to be promotable in their organizations. I’ve worked in Fortune 100 firms designing and facilitating talent management systems where executives pick the employees they want to groom for leadership at higher levels, and I can tell you that the companies who do this most effectively use experiential learning to develop the people they consider to be top talent.

Managing your own learning experiences to expand your learning agility includes intentionally building a strategic portfolio of learning experiments, mining them for the insights and capabilities they provide, and talking about them in a way that appropriately takes credit for the accomplishment. Of course, you already learn experientially any time you step out of your comfort zone to do something you didn’t already know how to do or haven’t done before – managing a sorority rush, planning a voter registration drive, or participating in volunteer work.

Here are three ways to make the most of the experiential learning you're already doing:

1. Intentionally plan strategic learning experiences rather than having them just happen randomly. Go for different type of learnings or outcomes, and link them together so they build off one another.
2. Reflect and debrief during and after your experience to crystallize the learning. If you just have the experience and don’t sort through it for what you got out of it and what you can use next time you lose most of the benefit.
3. Talk about the experience in a way that takes advantage of the accomplishment. Translate your results and what you learned into words that are attractive to recruiters and hiring managers.