Recharge your Resilience

Do, Stop, Recharge, Do Again

Do, stop, recharge and then do again, … sounds like the strap line for a battery advert. How does this apply to the new normal of the fourth industrial revolution post corona? A recent article in the Harvard Business Review started me thinking about the links between resilience, endurance and recharge. The do, stop, recharge and then do again cycle, which I am for the purposes of these blogs going to call the Resilience Cycle, describes most activities we do in the short, medium and long term.

Resilience is a word that has come to be overused in so many contexts it starts to loose its visibility. As an educator, I take resilience to mean the ability to adapt to changing challenges by learning and more importantly using new skills.

Endurance is the ability to keep going. As any marathon runner will tell you eventually reach the limits of your endurance. Endurance may not necessarily accomplish the goal of task completion or allow you to engage in the next phase or task. Outlasting everybody else is not necessarily a great work survival strategy if your wellbeing is compromised. Equally applying the same approach repetitively to solve a problem, which is often an endurance strategy approach, can ultimately not be most efficient use of personal and collective resources. We see this a lot in educational settings with the successive rounds of assessing and reporting on student progress.

A combination of endurance and resilience is the beginning of change management strategies rather than change survival. The ability to pause reflect and recharge is a skill we are not very good at in our rush, rush, busy approaches to task completions. More activity does not necessarily mean greater production. The working at home challenge and furloughing that a lot of us are experiencing in the UK gives us a chance to consider our own Resilience Cycle.

Resilience Cycle Post Corona Virus Challenge

In these interesting times some have been given the safety net in the UK of the Job Retention Scheme. This will end at some point. The airline industry which is usually one of the quickest to react to global changes and is already considering their own resilience cycles. Ryan Air is talking about 3000 job cuts from it’s operations. British Airways is restructuring with 12000 loses globally, hinting that Gatwick Airport will cease to be a hub of operations. These workers are just a few of the extra numbers that will be competing for employment in existing roles, until the adjustment to the new normal occurs. We will recognise when this has happened by the number of new roles that emerge that encompass remote working and social distancing rules. What can workers do in the short term?

“We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist … using technologies that haven’t been invented … in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.” – Richard Riley , former US Secretary Education

I first heard this phrase from a direct manager about fifteen years ago. Usually when we use this as educators we are talking about the workspace in the distant future, at least 10 years in the future . The working at home that some, who are able to, have experienced has been on a much smaller timescale, days in some cases. How prepared were they?

With the close of the Job Retention Scheme scheduled for the end of June 2020 in the UK furloughed workers have two possible scenarios. They return to work or they are made redundant. As part of the furlough scheme one activity that is permitted is training or CPD. The UK Government has launched it’s own recommended CPD training for a digital workspace, the Skills Toolkit.

Going forward the implication is that all who are furloughed should be doing some sort of training. At some point there will be an enquiry into individual employers direction of staff during furlough. This will not just be to catch those that have taken money for furlough but continued to work normally but also to ascertain how ready employees that have ultimately been made redundant are to take up new opportunities. After all if there is no demand for the services your job provides, it is likely that industry sector might not survive without radical changes.

So to finish is a quick set of points to consider to make yourself ready for the fourth industrial revolution.

• Visit the Skills Toolkit and sign up for a course, most providers such as FurtureLearn and OpenLearn, provide them for free. Do not commit to other offers of training that are paid for courses that promise future work guaranteed, personal experience suggests this is unlikely to be true. Plus at present there are so many free providers that the paid course business model for retraining has already sailed because of job market uncertainty.
• Do keep a separate record to that of the course provider of what you are doing on the training front. Include dates, number of hours, activity and any outcome. When you return back to work this can form the basis for return to work meetings. The lock down is no different to be on long term sick leave and requirements for reintegration to the workspace.
• Keeping Records is also important if you are unfortunate enough to be made redundant being organised now will help with return to work interviews while being unemployed. Using the Skills Toolkit will also help with this as DWP consultant/case worker will understand these courses and may be more readily able to advise.
• Take a look at the National Qualification Framework , you might not have even been aware that there was such a thing. A good guide as to what this maps to in practice can be quite informative. A degree is not as high up the climbing frame as you might think. If you have skills at one level of the pyramid through one job role, new roles that will emerge in the new normal requiring same level of skills may be worth considering.

Final point remember to try the stages of the Resilience Cycle. Routines are good for knowing when to go through the recharge phase.