Learn, Unlearn, Relearn

With the skill sets changing very fast – older skills getting redundant in a matter of few years – the new mantra is to unlearn the earlier skills and acquire fresh skills. For example, when IT started taking roots, there was a huge demand for data entry operators, but with newer technologies such as OCR and voice modulation, the data entry operations seem to be a redundant skill.

However, my experience shows that much of it is hyped and this has been there all along. Let me cite some real life personal examples. I started my schooling at a Municipal corporation school where I was made to write Hindi alphabets and numerals on a wooden tablet called “takhti”. The very next year I switched to Central School and shifted to paper and pencil. Mine was the second batch that had to study an extra year as just a year before, the boards shifted from 8+3 to 10+2. Imagine the mental state when the option of going to college got deferred by full one year! When I joined the banking sector, I witnessed changes on continuous basis – from December closing to March closing, manual ledgers to ALPMs, public sector to private sector. mechanised banking to anywhere banking, typewriters to computers – its an endless list. At each stage of life agility and adaptability were required and those who were slow in adapting suffered!

The only difference is that pace of change has become much accelerated. What used to take a decade to change is now changing in a much shorter timeframe, but it’d not be appropriate to glorify this is as an extraordinary event of the modern times, underestimating the earlier period altogether.

And it’s great to see our elders, who didn’t really use modern technologies in their active work days, slowly but surely adapting to smart phones using features like WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Google search, net and mobile banking freely and rather enjoying the same.

If the change is only constant then we should be constantly changing rather than resisting the change. Nothing is impossible to at least learn if not master! Let’s go with the flow and enjoy all this new development by being part of it rather than staying or shying away from it! There’s some learning – our scriptures, wisdom received from our elders, virtues as taught to us by our teachers that should always stay with us ! Rest we should be ready to unlearn and relearn to stay updated! After all didn’t we all have to unlearn what we learnt at school that there were 9 planets to relearn that the number was down to 8, Pluto no longer remaining a planet!