How to Learn Faster & Overcome Obstacles: Grow Your Career With Quick & Effective Learning Tips

Introduction

What to learn new skills but don’t know how to learn faster? or how to choose the right skill to learn that contributes to professional growth?

Mastering new skills is not an optional thing in today’s competitive world. Infect being able to learn new skills fast & effectively is the real key to success. 

Whether you want to learn another language, any professional skills related to your career ? or just want to learn to play the piano, the guitar, the drums, or some other musical instrument? You might wonder how to learn a new skill quickly and effectively? Well be patient, this is what we are going to discuss in this “How to Learn Faster” guide. We will also guide you through the right approach to how to learn better and faster with some potential tips to help you accomplish your learning goals.

Before moving forward to  “How to learn new skills quickly?” Let's first understand why it is important to learn new skills.

Why is it Important to Learn New Skills?

Learning new skills not only helps you stay ahead with self-development but also maintains your relevance and ensures your future career success. Committing to learning any new skill, will soar your opportunities for career advancement, expand your professional networks and enhance your knowledge base. Being open to learning new skills can also show employers that you value your commitment to your career and could be an asset to their company. The best thing about learning new skills is that it keeps you exciting and drives you towards growth both on a professional and personal level.

How to Choose the Right Skill to Learn that Contributes to Career Growth?

Since there are lots of skills that are highly demanded across different industries and niches, you might wonder how to choose the right skill, and this is more critical when it comes to your professional growth. In general, it could be any skill that foster-

• Career growth
• Career transition
• Personal development
• Motivation & entertainment.

At a personal level, it could be any skill that you’re passionate about. But when it comes to career growth, it's very crucial to pick the right skill. 

Pick the Right Skill: While choosing any new skill, make sure it is relevant to your career, your organization, and will add value to your existing profile. Gaining a new skill is an investment of time and money( training fee) so you need to know upfront what the return will be.

You Have To Figure Out- 

• Will it be relevant to your career? 
• Will it add value to your current profile? 
• Will it help in a future job role you wish to attain? 

Get the Right Help: Another better way is to find someone trustable who has mastered the skill you’re trying to attain. A senior guy, ready to give you honest feedback about their journey, what they have achieved after learning that particular skill, how to learn fast and effectively, and what more you can learn after obtaining that skill for further career advancement.

How to learn new skills quickly?

As you want to know, how to learn fast and effectively here, our honest answer is that learning new skills is not going to happen overnight, it takes time and patience. Learning time will vary depending on skill, adaptability, and efficiency. Though with the right approach you can accomplish your learning goals faster. Here are some general rules you can follow to learn a new skill quickly and effectively.

Set a Clear Career Goal: Steps on How to Learn Faster

You can start by defining a clear career goal that you want to achieve. Based on that career goal, you can enlist the relevant, demanding skills to boost your career. For instance, if you want to become an influential public speaker, your learning goal might be to master the essential skills for delivering an impactful speech. Once you have chosen the specific learning goal inlined with your career objective, you can move on to planning the effective learning approach for effective & quick learning.

Leverage the Pareto/"80/20" Principle: Steps on How to Learn Faster

The Pareto Principle is the right answer to your question” how to learn fast and effectively” also known as the 80/20 rule, it states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.  According to the 80/20 rule, learning a new skill can be processed by identifying those sub-skills which will give you the 80% outcome that you want. For example, if your goal is to master communication skills, the "80/20" rule implies that you can master 20% of its sub-skills (such as improving tone, learning professional vocabulary in written messages, or learning expressive body language) to master 80% of your overall communication skills.

Deconstruct Your Skill Into Sub-Skills: Steps on How to Learn Faster

The Specific skill that you have decided to learn, could be a lengthier one. Now when you are clear with your career and learning skills, next you have to break down the skill that you want to learn into sub skills. Doing so will give you a clear picture of how to proceed effectively by learning techniques to master each isolated sub skill. For example, if you want to learn to play the guitar, first you have to learn how to press down a chord pattern with your fingers. Once you are able to switch chord patterns, then add the strumming. Next, you have to learn how to strum the chord. Finally, you will combine all these individual learning practices to play the guitar. So here you go!!

Identify & Eliminate Potential Barriers: Steps on How to Learn Faster

When you start learning new skills, over time there might be some resistance stopping you or destructing you from learning. The most tricky barrier to overcome is lack of motivation, especially when it takes longer to learn any new skill or it could be more such as a financial barrier, time barrier. So, you should identify potential barriers and the best possible solution to eliminate them. And above all don’t forget to motivate yourself, because till the day you are motivated and passionate to achieve your career goals, no small, materialist barrier can stop you!

Focus on one skill at a time: Steps on How to Learn Faster

Due to certain reasons, many of us already struggle to multitask and it is completely fine for the things we already know how to do, but it will definitely not work with learning any new skill in fact it is just about guaranteed to drag down your progress. For a stronger foundation, it's essential to focus on one skill at a time until you excel at it. Then move on to the next sub skill, this approach might take a bit of time but in the long run, it will help emerge with excellence. Breaking the specific skill into small sub skills would help you learn faster and accomplishing a small sub skill will keep you motivated towards your end goal.

As you want to know how to learn quickly, here our opinion is that it's not important to learn faster but the important is how to learn deeper because by making a small time difference you can make a big difference in your level of success. Here we didn’t mean that taking a long time to learn any skill is good but what we are trying to convey is, do justice with your learning process, get in-depth learning, it will lead you to sensational success.

How to Overcome Challenges in Learning New Skills

When you start learning any new skills, it's obvious that to face certain challenges it could be materialistic or psychological. Here we are going to discuss the best ways on how to learn quickly and overcome challenges effectively.

Avoid Distractions & Stay Focused

Distractions whether it is psychological or external, not only hurt productivity but also have negative emotional effects. Research has shown that attention distraction can lead to higher stress, a bad mood, lower productivity, and badly impact learning capabilities. With growing digitalization, social media, most of us easily get distracted from our goals.

As you want to know how to learn easily, the best answer for you is to ditch distraction and stay focused.

Find A Mentor

Effective Mentor can boost your progress by “developing your taste” or by guiding and motivating you through a progressive road map. By looking at what the “greats' ' in your field did when they were at your stage, how they overcame challenges. By internalizing their best qualities you can learn how to learn fast and effectively.  Here we didn’t mean that you should copy them but what we are trying to interpret is that you can learn from their experience, positive approach, and mistakes to build a fruitful road map to learn better and faster. 

Hire a Professional Trainer

While we firmly believe that you do not need to spend lots of money to learn a new skill, hiring a coach or paying to take a course can be beneficial in certain cases.

But hiring a coach or taking a course can also be a good way to accelerate your initial progress, helping you to bypass some of the aimless confusion you might otherwise encounter. This route is also helpful if you need to learn a new skill on a tight external deadline (a new job, a trip, etc.). Finally, hiring a coach or taking a course can also be a beneficial form of external commitment to learning your new skill. 

Prioritize task

In today's rushed life we are all multitaskers but this multitude of attitudes can become overwhelming. Task prioritization helps you stay focused on your most important tasks by making them the highest priority. And when it comes to “how to learn faster” prioritization is again the best approach to stay focused and organized, as most professional skills aren’t one skill at all, instead, they’re a bundle of skills.  Prioritizing the sub-skills in an organized manner will definitely help you learn a new skill quickly and effectively.

Explore additional potential resources

This could be the correct answer to your question of how to learn faster, as potential resources can speed up your learning whereas limited or lack of resources may limit your learning. So, you can look for additional tools and potential resources to help you learn your skills. For instance, if you are learning new computer skills, you might consider checking good youtube channels or you might join a community group to learn computers or you can join any basic computer training classes. Similarly, for any skill that you want to learn, such additional resources can overcome learning obstacles and make your learning fast and effective.

Find Opportunities to practice

Learning is incomplete without extensive practice. if you learned any skill but won’t practice, it will dump your learning time as well. It's a practice only that can make you perfect in that particular skill. Seek out real-world, practical opportunities to practice the skills you are learning. The more opportunities you have to practice the skill that you have learned, the more learning will take place and increase your chances of accomplishing your goals more effectively.

For example, if your goal is to learn effective communication or new ways to communicate with others, you might think about volunteering as a coordinator at a community center.

Learn From Mistakes

As you practice your skills, you may make mistakes. Mistakes or failures are not bad even they can be a beneficial tool for learning. Because mistakes can teach you, what you did last time that causes failure or what would be the better approach that was previously attempted. People who learn from their own mistakes are intelligent but the people who learn from others’ mistakes are smarter ones. We wish you to be intelligent as well as smarter for fast and effective learning.

Track Your Progress

Tracking progress not only holds you accountable but also helps keep you motivated when you feel a lack of confidence or slacking off. When you see how much progress you’ve made and what section you have left to accomplish, you’ll be far less likely to skip practicing. There are many ways to monitor performance and track your progress. Habitica is an excellent tracking app for this purpose, but you can simply use a pen or paper to note what you have done and what you have to complete. 

Teach It To Others

Practicing your skill is challenging enough but here another best way to practice deliberately is to teach what you have learned to others. You can share what you learn with your team members, your manager, or your co-workers. While you start teaching others, you pitch yourself with more research and quality skills and this makes your learning more focused and practical.

Effective Tips With Dos & Don’ts on How to Learn a New Skill Quickly and Effectively

• Be patient with yourself- it usually takes at least six months to develop a new skill
• Take Frequent Breaks- to keep your mind relaxed and motivated
• Be Curious-  to make our brains more receptive for learning a new skill
• Be accountable- Keep a record of your learning
• Practice a Lot- Spend More Time Practicing Things You Find Difficult
• Explore potential resources- to keep yourself updated with potential resources.

Dos & Don’t on How to Learn Quicker

Do:

• Select a skill that add valued by  your organization and manager
• Divide the skill up into sub-skills, manageable tasks
• Track your performance timely 
• Track what you have accomplished and what left
• Ask others for guidance and feedback

Don’t:

• Try to learn in a vacuum 
• Believe Inherent the Talent Myth.
• Involve someone who isn’t responsible for evaluating you
• Assume it’s going to happen overnight 

Essential & Quick Skills to Learn For Professional & Personal Growth

Here are some of the most important developmental skills that will help you build a strong personality for professional & personal growth.

Here if you ask how to learn faster, you can follow the above-discussed point to flourish your career with these effective skills.

Read more about the benefits of learning new skills.

Final Words On How to Learn Faster

There may be few skills that you can learn fast but still“It’s not going to happen overnight. There are different stages of learning, that you have to pass on.

Lengthier skills may take six months or it may take a bit longer, depending on skill and individual adapting and learning capacity. Asking the question of how to learn faster is not wrong but don’t rush to learn faster, focus on getting in-depth learning with deliberate practice to meet your end goal. If you want to learn IT training courses better to join professional trainers for career advancement.

One last piece of advice: Don’t wait for the perfect moment to start learning. If you want to learn any new skill, pick a pen and paper, start it right now, write down your learning goal, break it into sub-skills and come up with a strategic plan. Just jump in, make mistakes, practice a lot. When you look back a few months you’ll be glad you see how far you’ve come. 

Live your best life by learning how to learn easily and effectively. Good luck!!

Did we answer your question, how to learn a new skill quickly and effectively? Want to explore quick skills to learn? You can start with one of the skills on this list.

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