Living and learning: what is lifelong learning?

Find out about the importance of adopting a constant learning attitude and how this can benefit your professional path. Meet lifelong learning.

Constantly seeking new learning and personal development is something important everyone knows, but despite that it is still easy to end up leaving this search for information attached to specific moments of our lives.

In a market where changes and novelties are more and more frequent, adaptability becomes even more important to professionals than it used to be.

To achieve good results, today's professional needs to be constantly adapting to the environment, acquiring new knowledge and skills that allow them to face the professional challenges that arise daily.

The very evolution of technological introduction in the labor market shows the importance of this constant movement. It is nothing new that technology has been increasing its participation in the professional environment, taking care of repetitive tasks that could be easily automated with the use of suitable hardware and software.

In this context, the importance of professionals capable of frequent adaptation grows, understanding how these changes take shape on a daily basis, and making decisions or executing projects that combine the available resources to carry out high-quality deliveries.

With all this in mind, it is clear that to stand out professionally, you can no longer wait until someone covers your development. Each professional needs to put himself in a position of proactive development, and this is where lifelong learning comes in.

What does lifelong learning mean?

Although there is no standard definition of what lifelong learning is, the concept behind the term refers to the constant, self-motivated education process that is not necessarily carried out within a formal educational institution.

The idea is that the learning process accompanies each person throughout their lives, not being restricted to the stages of childhood, youth, or early adulthood, as is commonly the case until the end of undergraduate studies at a university.

This disruption of the standard period of learning is what makes it clear that learning can also take place outside formal institutions such as colleges and schools. It is necessary for the professional to adopt an attitude of eternal learning  - it was already said by Gonzaguinha — absorbing knowledge throughout its history and in each new situation.

The concept of lifelong learning is also usually presented as consisting of four pillars: learning to know, to do, to live together and to be. Now you check a little about each of them.

learn to know

This pillar reinforces the importance of not only seeking in-depth learning in specific areas of knowledge but seeking the pleasure of acquiring information in general, allowing all these learnings, both broad and specific, to interact and result in the construction of each individual's learning. individual.

The importance of curiosity and  questioning is clear, seeking to understand more and more the situations in which you are involved and actually creating new knowledge based on your experience.

learn to do

Not only is it important to know different subjects and collect multiple pieces of information, all this theoretical baggage needs to be put into practice to promote the complete understanding of each piece of knowledge, as well as the retention of learning.

Considering the context of professional environments, this pillar is also reflected in the importance of learning to perform activities considering not only your knowledge in a given subject but also understanding how other people on your team can collaborate with each other in the most efficient way possible.

learn to live together

This was already mentioned in the previous pillar, but this third pillar reinforces the importance of understanding how each individual can contribute to different situations and promote a  rich and effective collaboration.

Understanding how you can interact in a team, relate to other people, and promote collaboration allows you not only to achieve high-quality results but also enables an intense exchange of experiences, which once again feeds each one's baggage of knowledge.

learn to be

Finally, the pillar of learning is to be related to human development more broadly. The characteristic of autonomy and independence promoted in lifelong learning makes room for each individual to seek not only technical and external knowledge — such as learning from an undergraduate course — but also characteristics and abilities such as memory,  critical thinking, creativity, and even the physical capabilities of each.

Here, it is also clear that extrapolating formal learning and starting with this type of personal development contributes to the growth of each professional as a whole since all these potentialities can be combined in different ways in different situations and, therefore, produce unique results.