Time to shake things up?

Quick gut check … when did you last do something at work that made you a bit uncomfortable? Put your hand up for a project you weren't sure you could pull off, or sat in a room as the least knowledgeable person there? If you're doing this constantly, gold star, you're exactly where you should be. If it's been within the year, not bad. If you're struggling to think of an answer at all – that's worth sitting with for a moment.

Here's the trap: the better we get at our jobs, the easier it becomes to stop stretching ourselves. Seniority buys us the option to stick to what we already know, and plenty of us quietly take it. But staying sharp isn't something that happens by accident as it takes a deliberate decision to keep putting yourself in the path of new knowledge and new experience, even when nobody's asking you to.

It feels like we've barely stopped shaking things up these last couple of years. AI has landed in most of our working lives whether we asked for it or not, hybrid working has settled into something more permanent than we expected, and the pace of change shows no sign of slowing.

You may feel fresher than ever and at the top of your game because you've had to keep adapting the way you work. Or you may just feel exhausted by it all. Either way, you should ideally make time for learning, and time is the one thing many of us are short of.

And, if that is unlikely to change for you any time soon, here are three quick-fire ways to actively bring learning into your working week: -

1. Look left and right instead of up and down. Get out of your silo. This means seeking out experience in and exposure to other areas of your organisation. It will give you a much better appreciation of the challenges colleagues face and how you might respond to them. Get as much exposure as you can to different disciplines. It's fascinating, enriching and pragmatic. Pragmatic because there's a big link between learning and earning. You're making yourself more marketable.
2. Commit to one key learning investment a year. That's not too much to ask of yourself or your employer. Promise yourself you will learn one significant skill every year. It could be through formal study, a course or workshop, something online, getting properly hands-on with a new tool, or simply reading deeply around the subject, but it should result in you being able to do something you couldn't do before and something you can use in your work. Learning is liberating so don't deprive yourself.
3. Put your hand up more. Volunteer to take on new responsibilities, participate in different projects, take on a problem child task that no one else wants. It may be something you struggle with at times or feel scared about too, but you'll come out the other side of it fresher and better. To do this you may need to let go of another activity that could be done by someone else or perhaps doesn't need doing at all.

No one wants to stand still. Sometimes we think we do. We tell ourselves we'll tread water for a bit, enjoy the comfort of knowing what we're doing and after everything the last few years have thrown at us, who can blame us? That feeling won't last long. Humans live to learn, we want to grow and get better, and sometimes that means not being the cleverest, it means being a beginner again. As the saying goes: "If you are the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room."

If you work in fundraising, this isn't just a personal challenge, it's a strategic one.

Our founder Helena Sharpstone is joining THINK Recruitment at the Scottish Fundraising Conference in Glasgow this September to explore exactly this: how fundraising teams can identify the future skills their people will need, and how to go about building them. If you're heading to the conference, come along to the session.