ADVANCED LEARNING

By now you've covered basics in your chosen field and you've started to apply what you have learned into action. You've got some experience of your own now, and you are learning from your mistakes.

How then do you advance further?

Obviously, if you've been in contact with an expert you can still gain from that contact, but you've also developed another important resource at this point as well. Yourself.

If world still depended on knowledge of first generations of man, you would not be reading this today. Obviously then, it is possible to create new ideas and advance into new ground based on basics of education that you already possess.

This is creativity.

They key to creativity is to constantly be thinking of ways to improve. Look for holes or rough spots in a process, then think of how you can fill them or smooth them out. Look also at best points and discern what element makes it best. Can that element then be used in entire process?

Asking questions of both others with knowledge and experience and yourself can lead to answers that further your education. Talk things out with someone you respect or learned from in past. Always maintain a relationship with those you've determined to be good resources.

Here’s a current example: buying a train ticket has been a problem for customers for years. Until recently all train tickets needed to be purchased in person from a main train station. This meant going there, joining ever present queue, buying ticket and then traveling home. In a large city this adds up to a couple of hours of your time which could be better occupied elsewhere. Recently telephone services have been introduced but they aren’t ideal either because you cant actually see any information to review it. Its passed to you piecemeal and ticket is selected for you. The Internet however is potentially well suited to buying train tickets, customers could actually view train timetables from wherever they are and select their ticket themselves. Customers love option of good self-service tools that enable them to be in control and do tasks themselves.

So, bearing all this in mind I wanted to: select my destination and travel times, at cheapest price, buy ticket online quickly, have it delivered to my home. All perfectly reasonable needs and wishes for a customer.

Three websites and two and a half hours later I’d finally bought my ticket. What happened? Well between them three companies had not considered my needs and wishes, it was an exercise in frustration and futility. They hid information, made it too vague or made process too inflexible. One site had a great looking homepage, which then failed miserably with text given on buttons, which was so vague I was left to figure out whether they even sold tickets online. I’m now convinced all promotional offers are just an exercise to mess me around, leaving me with responsibility for manually searching for every conceivable combination of journeys until I happened upon a good price or gave up from fury and frustration. All these things said in effect: WE DON’T CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT! -we only care about ourselves and our objectives. Clearly, it doesn’t matter which organisation you are, saying that to your customers is start of slippery road to ruin and businesses with that attitude will not survive for long. At least, not successfully.