Maintaining Your Employability in Any Economy

This session was very interactive – the audience had voting devices to answer questions posed by the speaker, Nigel Bristow. Bristow is the founder and president of Targeted Learning, a company dedicated to helping organizations fully engage the talents and energies of their people.

Bristow’s first question to the audience was: Which of the following is most predictive of your long-term career success?

1. Grades in college
2. IQ
3. Conflict management skills
4. Learning agility
5. Communication skills

The majority of the audience answered communication skills, but the correct answer was learning agility (39 percent of the audience answered correctly).

What is learning agility? According to Bristow, there are four cornerstones to learning ability:

1. Constantly looking for new challenges that will teach you new things.
2. Seeking feedback and criticism and being open to it.
3. Sitting back and reflecting on how things are going and how things have gone. It’s also asking yourself what you’ve learned from a specific experience, what you can do differently, and what you did to lead to that outcome.
4. Developing the discipline to change habits and learn new ones.

In order to stay employable, focus on growing your abilities and motivation and don’t get caught in your comfort zone, explained Bristow. You have to think in the following way to be employable: My career is a one-person business, my employer is my customer, and making my customer successful is job #1.

Bristow also described the five career stages that drive employability:

1. Acquiring knowledge
2. Applying knowledge
3. Creating knowledge
4. Sharing knowledge
5. Leveraging knowledge

During his presentation, Bristow asked several audience-participation questions and provided the audience with many anecdotal stories and a lot of advice. One thought that will stick with me was the following quote.

“Employability begins with staying focused on what we can control and not wasting a lot of energy on what we can’t control,” said Bristow.