The Importance of Learning with a Purpose

A common problem that I used to face as a trainer was that the participants hardly knew why they were attending training. The top two reasons given was one, that a superior asked them to go, and two, they needed to clock training hours requirements. As I was conducting training as part of a nationwide upskilling initiative, the training programme was fully sponsored. In most cases, a free programme usually implied a high no-show rate. To a certain extent, we had those two reasons to be grateful for the attendance – because if there was no such mandate that “forced” people to attend, they would likely have skipped it since there would arguably suffer no loss.

The scenario above is common and in reality, laden with issues. However, a main problem really is this detachment from the purpose of learning. In the world of learning, purpose is everything. And purpose gives us not just the clarity of why we are doing something, but opens us up to knowing how and what to do to move forward. 

Imagine a scenario where you would like to surprise someone with a self-made birthday cake. That’s great, but the only problem is you do not know how to bake a cake – at all. What would you do? A most natural step is that you will go and find out how to bake a cake, using all sorts of resources available at your disposal. In our current AI-era, even consulting ChatGPT on how to bake a cake can be considered learning. Why then, are we so prepared to learn? It boils down to having a clear purpose, and knowing what the learning would do for us. We might not necessarily end up with a Michelin-grade cake, but at least we could get nearer to that end goal than if we chose not to find out anything.

Thus, an important starting point for us to move in the direction of our business goals is to have clarity of our purpose. What do we really want to achieve? From knowing our answer to that, we then ask ourselves – what do I need to know in order to achieve my goals? For organisations, this boils down to distilling clearly to your staff both the goals of the business and the purpose(s) of the learning required. And just like the cake-baking example, distilling clearly our purpose will not immediately help us achieve our goals. However, it makes it clearer what we are learning for and helps us think in the same direction. For accounting purposes, this also ensures that every buck spent on learning is a buck well spent. 

So if you encounter a situation where you have been asked to go for training but do not know why, perhaps try to ascertain what is/are the purpose(s) of you attending this training. When you get that clear, it would also help you know how to make full use of what you have learnt to achieve your goals.