Professionals Note – The #1 Employee Success Factor In A Fast-Changing AI-World Is? (Your Learning Speed)

Yes, learning accelerators can double your learning speed!

Both corporations and professionals around the world understand the importance of continuous learning. In fact, the No. 1 characteristic that Google looks for in its new hires is learning ability. However, despite the importance of learning, only 42% of employees believe they continuously learn at work, while 39% say they never / rarely learn at work.

Professionals Need to Learn Faster and More Effectively

Although most professionals understand the value of continuous learning, almost all, without exception, complain that they simply can’t find enough time during work hours to keep up-to-date in their work-related learning.

So those who are striving to stay ahead of the learning curve are excited when they discover that there are a handful of what I call “learning accelerators.” These “learning accelerators” are tools that make it much easier for an individual employee to quickly acquire and fully understand new knowledge, technologies, next practices, and emerging solutions.

Incidentally, don’t expect much help in increasing your learning speed from your corporate L&D division, because their strategy focuses primarily on offering broadly applicable classes and workshops. Rather than the personalized learning that employees really need.

Unfortunately, I haven’t come across a single corporate training function that formally targets measuring (and improving) an individual employee’s learning speed!

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What Are The Most Effective Learning Accelerators?

Once you commit to increasing your learning speed, you will have eight learning accelerators to consider. The easiest-to-implement accelerators appear first in my list.

Discover “how the best learn”

The best way to identify learning sources in your job, profession and industry, rather than starting from scratch and using the traditional trial-and-error approach, is to periodically conduct an informal survey among the effective learners that you know, are connected with, or encounter.

Informally, ask each of them, “What are your very best learning sources for your job?” And if they give an insightful answer, next ask them for the best sources that cover your industry and business trends. In both cases, your definition of learning sources would include written sources, podcasts, videos, individuals, and/or events.

With the most cooperative individuals, go further and ask them to alert you in the future when they find a new powerful learning source. Then use the resulting “how the best learn” survey results to improve your own current list of learning sources and methods. Next, share your “how the best learn” list with your learning network and your teammates. Also, consider using this valuable list as “a trade” when you are seeking valuable learning information from others who may be reluctant to share.

Review all major seminar and conference agendas to learn the hottest topics

Many view the high volume of seminar and conference agendas that they receive as junk, but that’s a major error.

Conference managers put in a great deal of time and research into determining the hottest topics that professionals are ready to pay to hear; even if you don’t attend the event, the agenda will let you know what’s hot and which speakers are the most knowledgeable on each subject.

Search the speakers out on the Internet, where you will often find the same materials that they will present at the conference (that’s true for me). You should also realize that there are also extremely valuable “article aggregators” (e.g., recruiting headlines) that also let you know what’s hot by assembling a list of the titles of articles in a particular field that were released today.

Create your own “learning network” to spread the learning burden

This extremely effective accelerator spreads your learning burden among a small group that has agreed to participate in your informal “learning network.” This 3 – 5 member group adds value by spreading out the learning burden over up to five individuals who work in the same job family. Your learning burden will be reduced when the most valuable professional and industry publications are split up among the members. After reading them, those team members will supply each teammate with a summary of what they learned from their assigned sources that you now didn’t have to read. Historically, these learning groups met face-to-face, but now they are almost always virtual. 

Once the group begins to operate, each group member periodically informs the entire group about the 2 – 3 topics that they want to focus their learning on. Then, when any team member happens to run across an article, podcast, recorded presentation, slide deck, or blog that covers another member’s learning area. They send the information and a one-paragraph summary that covers the most valuable learning points. If you need more details on how to operate a learning network, click on this link.

Use AI to gain quantum improvement in your learning

Your learning is likely to quickly fall behind in multiple areas until you realize how much AI tools can improve your learning. AI excels as an essential learning tool because, unlike corporate-provided learning, it delivers extremely personalized and targeted information to you.

Of course, you should use Gemini to enhance your Google searches, but you must also ask ChatGPT or Claude to summarize long articles and books. And also to create broad subject area summaries (including predictions) from either your uploaded documents or its own research database. You should also use AI to generate customized answers and potential solutions. And finally realize that AI can add value when you use it to verify and improve the answers/solutions that you already have. 

Rely heavily on automated Google alerts

A Google alert is an automated, once-a-day Google search that, when refined, covers your most important learning areas (e.g., survey of AI problems). These alerts provide the creator with a once-a-day message that provides links to any recent articles, blogs, books, and podcasts that directly relate to your alert topic. These alerts are free, and you can have as many as you want. I personally have used over 30 of them (including “speed learning”). You can quickly create your own alerts by signing in and then going to Google’s alerts site.

Use podcasts because they allow you to learn while multitasking

Podcasts are a superior learning source simply because they allow you to learn while you are doing something else. You can listen to them while eating, exercising, searching the Internet, reading your messages, and commuting. This unique advantage means that there are many more total hours that you can use podcasts to learn. 

The volume of information is skyrocketing, so rely on AI summaries and scanning

The volume of available information can double in two years, in order to handle this mammoth volume of reading, all professionals will need to use time-saving tools.

Without these reading accelerators, you are unlikely to ever finish more than 25% of the books, magazines, and long articles you have set aside for later reading. Because failing to finish these important materials will, of course, mean that you will miss out on many key learnings. So rather than relying exclusively on reading digital materials the traditional way, you should instead learn to rely on AI to summarize them for you (this is an amazing capability). 

For the few materials where you feel that summaries won’t be sufficient, an alternative is to quickly scan most learning materials. With books, start by scanning the table of contents and then read the first and last chapters. For long articles and blogs, scan the introduction and read the final paragraph. For podcasts, slide sets, and videos, quickly skip to the last 5% of the material in order to learn the author’s final conclusions.

And then write and share a half-page bullet point summary of the scanned materials and share it with members of your learning network. 

Obtaining the most valuable information will be difficult, so learn to trade

When you are seeking extremely valuable information* (e.g., the best practices from an industry-leading company) from a knowledgeable person who is clearly reluctant to share. You should begin the transaction by assuming that the party with the information knows its high value.

So the common “something for nothing” approach simply won’t work. Instead, you must shift into “trading mode,” where you offer something of equal value in return for the information. The information that you might use as a trade might include your list of the best practice corporations and/or your list of experts in that subject area. As well as your research files covering the same topic, or your best learning sources on that topic. 

*The most valuable learning targets in a functional area

  The most impactful information targets are listed first.

• Information on the emerging “next practice” solutions in your target functional area.
• Information on the “best practice” solutions that have recently been implemented at top companies.
• Performance data on the “best practices” that have recently been implemented.
• Emerging problems in the functional area and industry. 
• Successful business cases and ROI assessments for emerging tools.
• Forecasts and plans covering what the top companies in your industry will do next.
• Implementation plans for emerging practices and tools.
• Solutions and tools that your top competitors have stopped using.
• A list of the leading experts, authors, vendors, and consultants in this functional area. 
• A list of your competitors’ top performers (for recruiting purposes).
• Any information that gives your function and company a competitive advantage.
• And of course, the best learning resources to use.

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The Top 5 Reasons Why You Must Increase Your Learning Speed

In case you doubt the value of increasing your learning speed in our rapidly changing environment, below you will find my list of the top five impacts that smarter and faster learning will likely have on your job, your career, and your team’s work performance.

1. Learning will lead to continuous improvement of your job performance – Most jobs now evolve so quickly that the knowledge and the tools that were required to perform your job at the beginning of the year may become obsolete by the end of that year. So, without a continuous flow of new skills and the knowledge to operate the emerging tools. Your on-the-job performance (and that of your teammates) will continually decline as will your chances for bonuses, desirable assignments, and promotions.
2. Maintaining your desired level of job security will require accelerated learning – The recent phenomenal growth of both AI and robotics. Has further accelerated the already rapid pace of job obsolescence that has led to widespread layoffs and job eliminations. To the point where, if you expect to maintain or increase your current level of job security, you will need to increase both your learning and skills to match the current and future rate of change in your job, team, and industry. To get promoted, you will probably need to be the fastest learner on your team.
3. Continuous innovation requires the fastest leading-edge learning – Each of the top valued corporations in the world has demonstrated the tremendous economic value that they receive from serial innovation. One of them, Google, found that innovation increases when just two factors, collaboration and discovery (i.e., learning), are maximized. That means when you and your colleagues are continually acquiring leading-edge knowledge, you will be much better able to collaborate and build new innovations.
4. Maintaining team speed and productivity demands uniform team learning – Once you realize that reaching most of your team’s goals requires consistent team-wide knowledge and capabilities. You will understand that it won’t be enough for you as an individual employee to be learning at the speed of change. Because so much of the team’s work is interdependent. Everyone on the team will need to be assisting each other to ensure that every team member learns at the same targeted speed.
5. Having a team of rapid learners will improve the recruiting and retention of top performers – One of the key motivators of top performers is the ability to continually learn and to continually stay on the leading edge of knowledge. So maintaining that learning environment will dramatically improve the retention of your current top performers. And as the word spreads externally, your practice of leading-edge learning will begin helping you attract and land a much higher percentage of top-performer candidates. 

Final Thoughts

Historically, most companies have left it up to their individual employees to decide the best ways to learn in order to keep their job knowledge current. However, now “what works” and “what is possible” is changing almost overnight. I find that employees now need help and guidance in learning through a new set of learning accelerator tools that can help them learn more in a shorter period of time. Because, like it or not, if you expect any level of job security in the future. You will have no choice but to become a rapid, leading-edge, continuous learner. Not just in the area of AI, but in every area of technology and business!

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Notes for the reader

This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.

Please help spread his ideas by sharing this with your team/network and posting it on your favorite social media.

Dr John Sullivan is its author – It first appeared in the 10 27/26 issue of Aggressive Talent Management.