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On your first day, you come to a chilling conclusion: you don’t know what you don’t know. That feeling can be paralyzing. You’re not incompetent, you tell yourself, but you’re really starting to feel like it now.
When I started working, I realized there was a huge gap in my knowledge. While I knew some of my skills were transferrable, there were so many gaps in knowledge. So I had to figure out a plan: I needed to learn a lot of things without asking my colleagues to teach me everything along the way.
Once you notice the knowledge gap, you might want to shrink at the thought of closing it. How can you retain all this new information without sacrificing your work, health, or sanity?
The truth is that there’s nearly a guarantee of a knowledge gap when you start a new job. However, you can figure out how to quickly close the knowledge gap with this 3-step process.
1. Be Strategic with Your Learning
If you got a new job, but had to work in another language, would you get a textbook and try to learn it front to back? Or skip to the most useful vocab and phrases you’ll use at your job?
Polyglot Lindie Botts advises new language learners to engage in strategic learning. If you work in science research, certain vocab words aren’t necessary for your day-to-day interactions. Do you really need to know how to say carpentry in French if you don’t know how to say “How do I use this microscope?” at your job?
It’s easy to fall into a similar trap at your new job. It can be overwhelming to look at all the things you have to learn how to do in order to do your job. However, like efficient language learners, figure out what things you need to learn that will offer you the biggest impact factor. Then, you’ll figure out how to find tools to remedy your knowledge gap problem.
Identify the high impact skills
Answer this question:
“If I could improve one skill today for my job, what would it be?”
These can be specific tools or broad areas of knowledge. What skill, if improved, would create the most impact?
- Do you need to negotiate prices to get the best deals possible?
- Do you need to perform protocols or use machines you’ve never heard of before?
- Do you need to analyze data, then use it to make suggestions to your team?
Just like learning a new language, you don’t have to learn everything for your job right away. My job requires knowledge in many different fields, from team management to cell culture, while doing it all in my second language. They didn’t exactly teach me phrases like “The incubator’s sensor is giving us lower-than-average CO2 levels” in high school French class, so learning job-specific terminology in French was my first priority for a few months.
Over time, when you level up in these skills, you’ll be able to shift your focus to improving others. After my French got to a good level, I spent more time learning the science behind our protocols and how to improve them.
After you identify your impactful goal, you’ll need to find appropriate resources.
Find resources to match your high impact skills
With so much high-quality information available at our fingertips, it makes us feel like we have to use everything as a resource — watch every video, read every blog post, attend every online seminar, buy every book.
When you spread your learning over too many resources or unnecessary information, you become an ineffective problem solver — this is called analysis paralysis.
After you’ve identified your problem areas, keep your resources focused on closing that specific gap. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole of research (or procrastination). It can be an audiobook, video, blog post, or online course.
Other people have the knowledge that you’re lacking, and most are willing to share it for free.
If you think a resource can help you with multiple skills, not just your current focus, save it for later. Focus on practical, high-impact knowledge that will immediately help you. Think about the skills you need for your job and prioritize them.
2. Comb Through Info-Dense Resources by Hand
If some information is taking some time to fully understand, you may need to incorporate some deep learning sessions, which include taking notes by hand.
Even if your resources are available online, you could benefit from printing them out and annotating them. Adopting generative note-taking practices, such as “summarizing, reframing, [or] paraphrasing,” helps you understand a topic at the conceptual level, not just with regurgitating facts.
Cal Newport, the best-selling author of Deep Work, created a notetaking system to help him digest large amounts of information quickly. You can use this same system to comb through information-rich resources and actually understand them.
Identify the important topics and leave out the rest
Most published material can be condensed. All material contains central ideas and filler, and long texts tend to have lots of filler. The filler ranges from important examples to multiple anecdotes, but plenty of it is unnecessary. Aim to learn the most crucial concepts and ignore the useless filler.
Pseudo-skimming is the better cousin to skimming. The technique ensures your read only the important points and not the filler. You don’t want to read everything, just the important ideas and crucial examples.
When you’re scanning your piece, place a dot(.) next to a “big idea” paragraph or section and a dash( — ) next to an explanation or example of the previously marked big idea. This notetaking method, called Morse-Code Notetaking by Cal Newport, aims to get through the piece as quickly, identifying things worth learning. It allows your brain to keep its momentum while reading.
Paraphrasing
When you finish, go back through the text and read the places you’ve marked with a dot. Do you still think these are important? If so, paraphrase it, then look at the dash following it. Is this still important? If yes, paraphrase it too.
If the dot isn’t actually important, cross it out and move onto the next dot.
Paraphrasing is important — you need to get the statements into your own words instead of regurgitating them.
Paraphrasing text can seem cumbersome, but it plays a crucial role in your understanding. You can repeat this with other texts in the future.
3. Making Connections on Another Level
If you’ve made it this far, good on you. There’s one more step to go in order to truly understand your desired topic.
In order to truly solidify your newfound and hardwon knowledge, you need to make new connections. You’ll need to connect the information you learned and integrate it into your long-term memory.
Use a simple 3 topic framework to get your connecting muscles working.
- Connect it to you. How does the text connect to you and your experiences?
- Connect it to other texts. How does the text connect to other texts — assigned readings, or other books you’ve read.
- Connect it to the world. How does the text connect to the world — historical events, changes in the industry, clashes in theory, etc.
Thinking about how all the topics you’ve learned connect to other things — yourself, other pieces of work, and the world. How can you apply this information? When will it be useful? What problems will it help solve? Are there any problems that arise from it?
Don’t be afraid to keep asking questions and finding different ways to look at your information. Rinse then repeat.
Conclusion
It’s a humbling experience knowing you have a lot to learn. But once you realize your pitfalls, you can start setting yourself up for success at your new job. This often means putting in extra effort outside of work and combing through resources.
To recap, here’s what you need to do
- Identify the skills you need to improve, and eventually master, at your job. Then pick the skills that will have the most impact on your performance. Focus on them for now, and then search for resources only for that skill.
- For information-dense resources, only focus on important topics. Pseudo-skim and put a dot for important big ideas and a dash for supporting evidence. After you’ve finished rotating, read through all the dots and paraphrase all the important points.
- Draw connections around all the new information you’ve gathered. Think about how it relates to you, other information, and the world. Write down any questions or thoughtful conclusions.