Unlearning: the key to learning new skills

Lifelong learning is a mantra adopted by Education Authorities in the UK. It is meant to represent the notion of continually updating one's skills throughout life so that they remain relevant to the current job market.

In this recessionary time, training tends be cut back by both companies and individuals as money becomes more difficult to obtain. However the flip side of this coin is rarely mentioned, the notion of unlearning old and outmoded skills.

The idea of unlearning has been around for some time and seems to make sense when you consider how fast society and jobs change. Some skills simply have little or no relevance to the modern work place. For example the skill needed to process camera film at home is fast becoming nothing more than an esoteric hobby. In contrast the ability to use a photo editor to remove red-eye in digital pictures is a new skill in the ascendancy.

There is nothing new in this idea. In the 19th century Blacksmiths turned their hand from crafting horse shoes to building or maintaining steam engines. In the early 20th century those steam engineers in turn moved from the power of coal and water to the new fangled petrol engine.

The idea of outmoded skills was brought home to me over the weekend as I talked with my son about his forthcoming math exams. He explained that there two math exams to sit, the calculator exam and the non-calculator test.

A calculator in an exam? They were banned (and relatively rare anyway) when I took my school exams thirty years ago. "We had to use log tables instead" I said.

My son looked at me blankly and said "I don't know what you're talking about Dad".

I found myself attempting to recall how to use Log tables to make multiplication easier. "Why don't you just use the calculator?" asked my son incredulous at my attempts to use the tables I found in an old engineering book.

I got there in the end and demonstrated how the log/anti-log tables worked.

What was clear from this exercise was that a calculator was a great deal easier to use and that this was probably the first time in thirty years that I had actually attempted the technique. I had almost completely successfully unlearned the technique.

As I thought about this afterwards I realised that it not so much that we unlearn skills but more that we no longer invest time or effort in keeping them fresh and ready for use. As we move through life and NEED to learn new things it is clear that we also need ways to actively manage those skills we already have.

Unlearning may simply be the active decision to no longer invest time or effort in a particular skill. The payback for this is that we then have the mental capacity to take on new and more relevant skills for our life today.

So perhaps now is the time to have a personal audit and decide what skills to continue investing in and which to unlearn.