If you’ve been working for a while you will have amounted a healthy set of skills and a level of professional expertise that you can be proud of. You didn’t achieve it all on your own though – many people helped you along the way by sharing the gift of their knowledge either through formal training or less formally on the job.
Now it’s your turn. Share what you know with less experienced colleagues and discover that, it’s not only the recipient who reaps the benefits of shared knowledge, you do too. Here are three great ways it can be done:
Brown paper bag lunches
Brown paper bag lunches are a wonderful way to share what you have learned during your working life with your co-workers. The way that brown paper bag lunches work is for a group of co-workers to get together at lunchtime with their take-away lunches at regular intervals – say weekly or fortnightly.
Each time the group meets with their lunch, one member in an informal, relaxed way, shares something they have learned that others may not know about. Let’s say it’s your turn. You may have been reading up on something interesting that could be applied to a work situation, or you may have attended a conference that featured an interesting speaker, or maybe you have used a piece of technology that others haven’t and you think that they might find it useful.
You can share information from a past position or something that relates to your current role, it really doesn’t matter so long as it potentially helps your co-workers in some way. Brown paper bag lunches are also ideal for getting to know people at work better and promoting collaboration.
Lessons learned
Lessons learned is a retrospective process traditionally used in project management. It’s designed to capture both the negative and positive lessons that were learned during the execution of a project. A project can be anything from implementing new technology systems and creating training programs to organising a conference.
The point is that during any project some things will have worked well and others may not have. Sharing lessons learned with others who are about to undertake similar projects helps the new team to avoid some of the pitfalls of past projects and to leverage on some of the positive aspects. If you’ve worked on any type of project, you can share your lessons learned in this way.
Mentoring
One-on-one mentoring can be immensely satisfying for both the mentee and mentor. The mentor–mentee relationship is essentially a conversation between two people. Because everyone comes to the table with their own set of professional and life experiences, as mentor you’ll soon realise that your mentee isn’t the only one who is learning in the relationship. As you progress with mentoring your colleague, your knowledge will expand, deepen and become more ingrained.
Mentoring is also a great way to establish your reputation as an expert, demonstrate your leadership skills and advance your career. What’s more, mentoring can be a lot of fun and many mentoring relationships have been the start of long-lasting friendships. So look for opportunities to mentor others because the benefits to you are tenfold compared to the time and effort you put in.
