Learning to Build

Notes on how people become good at creating buildings

Learning on the job

The last few weeks have coincided with the start of the academic year, which also means a new intake of graduates arriving in practice. Since university, I’ve always liked the sense of starting something new at this time, or at least of resetting. I prefer it to New Year resolutions, partly because I like being ahead of the game. By January, I want to be able to tell myself I’m already doing it.

I’ve had several conversations with graduates starting work for the first time, and I’ve also begun some new mentoring relationships which I’m looking forward to developing. All of this has got me thinking about how much professional learning happens through the work itself, rather than separately from it. That became the subject of a new Practical Architecture blog post, Learning on the job: your first years in practice.

One of the ideas in it comes from Eduardo Briceño’s TED talk, How to get better at the things you care about. Briceño distinguishes between what he calls the performance zone, where the aim is to do something as well as we currently can, and the learning zone, where we deliberately experiment, seek feedback and try to improve.

That distinction is useful, but professional practice makes it complicated. Most of the time, we’re expected to perform and learn at the same time. The drawing still has to be issued, the calculation still has to be right, and the meeting still has to happen. But I suspect there is a limit to what we learn if we never create enough distance from the immediate task to think about it. We need occasionally to ask what the task is teaching us, how we might get better at it, and what else we still need to know.

There is another way in which professional practice makes learning more difficult. As a graduate, you have the advantage of being able to behave like a beginner. You can ask almost any question without embarrassment. But with increasing experience and career progression, you are expected to know more. That expectation can make learning harder, because to learn you sometimes have to expose what you don’t know. That requires a certain amount of vulnerability.

I wrote about this recently in a LinkedIn post, which you can find here. I was thinking about swimming as well as work. In swimming, I’m quite happy for a coach to point out that I’m doing something badly, because the whole point is to improve. At work, the same degree of openness can feel less comfortable, particularly when experience is supposed to signal competence.

At the same time, I’ve been catching up with my CPD records. I have obligations to both architectural and engineering institutions, and although I was behind with the paperwork, I discovered that I was certainly not behind with the learning itself. Lunchtime CPDs, conferences, lectures, reading, research, presentations, mentoring and ordinary project work add up to far more than the minimum requirements.

But I realised something. My problem is not really the amount of learning. It is being deliberate enough about it, and disciplined enough to reflect on it afterwards. I should probably be clearer about what I want to learn, seek out opportunities accordingly, and spend more time asking what I understand now that I did not understand before, and what I would do differently next time.

I keep thinking I need to get better at this, if only the day job did not get in the way. But that misses the big point. The task is the day job, and the learning is the day job too.

Maybe we have to accept two things as being true at the same time: they are the same thing, and they are different things.