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Learning Is Fundamental

After retiring from her management position, Marjorie Dorr took art classes, learned to teach yoga, and became a vegan chef. “But I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing after feeling part of something bigger than myself and always growing during my career,” Dorr told me. “Frankly, I was bored. I felt like I was stuck. I was looking to get back into the flow and trying all kinds of things. I took random classes, but they didn’t shift my life.”

Then she and her husband moved from New Hampshire to Texas, to see if they might want to retire there. Once there, she applied and was accepted to the nine-month Tower Fellows program offered by the University of Texas at Austin. The program is for adult professionals who are full-time students on campus taking classes across the university.

“It’s a great opportunity for adults to learn new skills more relevant for their next chapter, or who just want to go back and take classes that you couldn’t take as an undergraduate because you had to be practical,” Dorr said. “This is a different chapter to grow in a way that doesn’t have the outcome necessarily of making a living.”

Rubbing shoulders in the classroom with undergraduates and graduate students “was exhilarating, humbling, frustrating—all of those emotions of a beginner learner,” she said. “For me, it felt more frustrating than when I was a 20-year-old. I felt panic at the time. I knew I was creating new neuropathways. My brain had become stale sitting out of the work world for some time.”

LEARNING RESOURCES FOR 50+

The Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute (dci.stanford.edu), Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative (advancedleadership.harvard.edu), and the University of Notre Dame’s Inspired Leadership Initiative (ili.nd.edu), for example, all offer similar educational immersions for people looking for what’s next. There is also a program offered by the Halftime Institute (halftimeinstitute.org).

The bottom line is that adult learning is the buzz. People are living longer and working longer. Incessantly boosting professional skills is nonnegotiable to stay on the job, mostly given the rapid-fire speed of technological advancements.

As Bradley Schurman, author of The Super Age: Decoding Our Demographic Destiny, always says when we speak together at events such as those presented by Next for Me, “Age @Work: The New Revolution,” our sometimes contrarian dialogue about the future of work for the rapidly growing 50+ population: “If you’re not learning, you’re not earning.”

So true.

Hotel entrepreneur Chip Conley founded the Modern Elder Academy (modernelderacademy.com), in Baja, Mexico, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, dedicated to midlife learning. “For decades, we’ve learned of the value of lifelong learning, but what’s important to and how a person learns at 30 years old is different than when you’re 60,” Conley, who is also the author of Wisdom at Work: The Making of a Modern Elder, explained to me. “This is why we’re seeing the emergence of ‘long life learning’ focused on helping midlifers and beyond live a life that is as deep and meaningful as it is long.” (Conley was named a 2019 Next Avenue Influencer in Aging.)

Washington, DC, resident Dr. Lisa K. Fitzpatrick, founder of Grapevine Health, has attended four sessions at the Modern Elder Academy (MEA). “I truly believe we should all be lifelong learners,” she said. “I was thinking about how to pivot my career and started exploring what it might be like to become an entrepreneur and on that journey, I learned about MEA. It came at a time when I was really burned out. And needed to be in a different environment.”

The basic premise of adult education is metamorphosing. “The lifelong learning concept is happening more and more for people across the arc of their careers because the world is changing, and the skill sets that are necessary are changing,” said Thomas Schreier Jr., founding director of the Inspired Leadership Initiative at the University of Notre Dame. “People are finding themselves at a dead end with no idea of where to go.

“Maybe the right idea is that you never really graduate from your university,” he added. “The academic world has not been preparing people for a portfolio career. It is going to have to adapt to help people have these multitrack careers.”

One of my favorite learning opportunities for those transitioning to work at a nonprofit is the University of Connecticut’s Encore!Connecticut (dpp.uconn.edu/encore-connecticut), which assists corporate and public sector professionals, mostly 50+, transitioning to management opportunities in the nonprofit sector. It also offers education in nonprofit leadership, management, operations, and funding strategies and practices. The program helps with nonprofit job-search strategies and résumé restructuring. Students also work on a two-month project with a nonprofit organization.

Many public colleges offer free or reduced tuition for both audited and credit courses for those 50+. AARP provides a list of state-by-state programs. University alumni centers offer live webinars, virtual lectures, and excursions. At Duke University, my alma mater, for example, Lifelong Learning for Alumni is a one-stop resource to link to a smorgasbord of online learning opportunities.

Other options to find classes include adult education centers, local libraries, community colleges, and Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes (osherfoundation.org), One Day University (onedayu.com), a subscription service, offers live streaming lectures and recorded talks. Free or low-priced online classes are available through sites like Coursera (coursera.org), EdX (edx.org), The Great Courses (thegreatcourses.com), LinkedIn Learning, MasterClass (masterclass.com), Skillshare (skillshare.com), TED Talks (ted.com/talks), and Udemy (udemy.com).

The Oasis Institute offers Oasis Everywhere (oasiseverywhere.org), a virtual lifelong learning platform with a menu of online classes for those 50 and older. GetSetUp (getsetup.io/classes) is an interactive, education platform for the 50+ set delivering virtual education to upskill older adults in the use of software and apps, among other subjects.

“Many older adults are coming back to learn how to make extra income from home and how to launch a business,” said Neil Dsouza, CEO and founder of GetSetUp. “They aren’t looking for a certificate or a degree. It is very practical.”

AARP Skills Builder for Work (aarp.org/work/skills-builder) is a suite of free courses including Microsoft Office fundamentals and other learning options.

My hope is that, as the new world of work unfolds, the Department of Labor steps up and reforms the American Job Centers it funds, so that they provide the free help to job seekers over 50. The nearly 2,400 centers are located throughout the United States, but until now have largely ignored the older workforce and its needs.

The tools are there. These centers (CareerOneStop.org) offer help with résumés, interviewing, free training, and coaching. If you haven’t done a résumé in 20 years or been on a job interview, you need this resource.

The Brookings Economic Studies Program’s 2020 report concluded:

Our proposed reforms would tailor the services offered at the American Jobs Centers to better meet the needs of a workforce that is considerably older on average than in the past. Job centers should include staff who specialize in counseling older clients; they should experiment with job placement programs tailored for their older clients; service staff should provide information and guidance on self-employment options, which are especially attractive to many older workers; and available training programs should include short courses that are customized to older workers’ learning needs and styles.¹

I second that!

To help an aging population continue to work and earn is not only good for the financial security of the workers, but it is a win for the economy. An employed worker pays taxes and buys goods and services. The is something the Department of Labor should strongly support.

“The need for workers to keep pace with fast-moving economic, cultural, and technological changes, combined with longer careers, will add up to great swaths of adults who need to learn more than generations past—and faster than ever,” Luke Yoquinto, a research associate at the MIT AgeLab and coauthor of Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn, told me in an interview for the New York Times.

BENEFITS OF LEARNING

By 2034, the number of adults age 65+ will outnumber those under the age of 18, according to the Census Bureau.² “That growth of older age demographics will translate to new demand for enrichment in the form of digital education,” Yoquinto said. “I would say that, for both good and ill, older demographics are going to serve as a proving ground for learning technologies in the coming years.”

And while learning is truly fundamental to both staying on the job and moving to new fields of work, there is something more soulful and enriching about learning at this stage of life. It is the added value that it brings to us that makes our world interesting and lights up our curiosity. That in turn impacts our success at work and in our lives.

The journey to appreciate something we didn’t know before or weren’t exposed to also builds the resilience necessary to weather setbacks in our lives and our work.

“One of the things that makes us resilient is that when we see a challenge, and when we face a struggle, we engage with it, rather than shut down,” Simon Sinek, author of The Infinite Game and Start with Why, told me. “What I have learned from my career is that something I learned over here helps me over there. Even if I don’t know that is happening, any kind of learning benefits all aspects of life.”

Sinek, for instance, is a bit of a dance aficionado. “My dancer friends kept telling me I should take classes, and it would help me and my love of the medium. I begrudgingly agreed, and I took some basic ballet classes.”

He explained to me that those classes helped his emerging work as a public speaker. “My posture is much better,” he said. “I move more effortlessly across the stage from my hips, instead of my shoulders.”

Resilience is a word that gets tossed around a lot, I know, but it truly is an essential part of our career and work success. When you’re in the process of learning, your viewpoint changes, and you spot connections that you never noticed before.

“Resilience is about being adaptable in a variety of different circumstances,” said Dorie Clark, who teaches executive education at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and is the author of The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. “It is a combination of being able to pick yourself up when there are setbacks, but also it is about having the kind of cross-training necessary to be flexible in an uncertain world where we don’t know what is around the corner.”

If you are starting over in a new career or a new job, launching a business right now, or working remotely, you probably are facing all sorts of new challenges and possibly being a greenhorn beginner all over again and not the one who has all the answers.

Face it. This can be mind-blowing psychologically. You will need to step back and look at your situation with some perspective. “People who commit themselves to a life of learning show up with curiosity,” Sinek said. “They show up with interest. They show up with a student’s mindset. You don’t have to be curious about everything. You have to be curious about some things.”

Those who habitually and deliberately engage in learning become more self-confident about their ability to figure things out, according to Beverly Jones, my good friend, go-to executive career coach, fellow dog-walker, and author of Think Like an Entrepreneur, Act Like a CEO and Get Your Happy at Work. “Each time they hit a bump, they spend less time lamenting and quickly turn to determining what they must learn in order to climb out of the hole,” she said.

Then too, learners foster a more optimistic outlook. “In part, this is because each time you become aware of learning something new it feels like a victory,” Jones said. “You maintain the positivity that is a key to resilience.”

No one learns in the same way. “I can’t read a book a week,” Sinek told me. “I learn by having conversations. I like talking to people who know more than me about any particular subject. I love peppering them with questions. And I love trying to say back in my own words what I think they are telling me to see if I understand it.”

For Cuyahoga County prosecutor in Cleveland Gayle Williams-Byers, learning is “that extra oomph to turn off the crazy in life and pour yourself into something that is fantastic that you can benefit from,” she said.

I am a perpetual student, so all of this resonates with me. That’s why I chose a career and a life as a journalist and writer, so, like Sinek, I could pepper people with questions, people far smarter and more worldly than me. It has made my life richer. It has kept me growing and my world of work alive, ever changing, and challenging.

It can do the same for you.

As the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote: “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”