I spent the day at the Learning Skills & Learning Technologies exhibition in London yesterday and sat in on a number of the free seminars that took place throughout the day. In three out of the five seminars the speaker talked about spending at least 15 minutes learning every day. 15 minutes of learning every day equals over 90 hours of learning every year. That’s a lot of learning!

This got me thinking about not only the benefits that amount of learning could bring, but also about all the things I could actually do in 15 minutes of my time every day to learn. No matter how busy we are in our jobs we can all make time for 15 minutes of learning. So I started a list:

Watch a TED talk www.ted.com

Read a blog article (here’s a good one – Reinforcing Learning in the Workplace )

Watch a YouTube video

Read up about a subject on Wikipedia (why not try this one – Lifelong Learning )

Listen to a podcast

Read a book, newspaper or trade journal e.g. HR Zone, Training Zone, Business Zone and TJ is another good one.

Talk to a colleague

Complete a module of e-learning

Please let me know if you have any more for my list or if there is anything that you would like to share with us?

I’m sure we all do some of the things on my list everyday anyway as we go about our daily tasks and routines and without really thinking about, but I’m going to introduce some more structure around what I spend my 15 minutes of time learning about and make a plan. I will also encourage my colleagues in the office to do the same and at the end of the week when we have our team meeting we can all discuss and share what we have all learnt during the week.

Paul Judge – Director at Optimus Sourcing