REFLECTIVE JOURNAL

LIFELONG LEARNING BEYOND AN MBA

Lecturer: Dr. ALVIN OH Submitted on: September 17, 2011

Submitted by: KUNAL GUPTA Student ID: 12644051

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Lifelong learning (LLL) is continuous building up of knowledge and skills throughout ones life. Lifelong learning should not only be treated as vocational education but also all other types of events like courses, seminars, meetings, publications, etc. which are likely to contribute to the development or improvement of skills, attitude, information, etc. which are indispensable or valuable for working and living in the society. Learning should take place throughout the life, in al life contexts from schooling to workplace, home, etc. Except to maintain certification, most people did not have a conscious attitude about being lifelong learners. Malcolm S. Knowles, the father of adult learning, predicted in 1980 that lifelong learning would become the organizing principle of all education, and now the term lifelong learning is part of everyday conversation in educational parlance. (DuyffRL, 1999) In the attempt to explain lifelong learning better, few real life examples along with the recommendations on how the same can be improved are being explained in the below text. Having a dinner with friends is always fun loving. But few things are really not accepted. At a dinner with friends, one of my friends spilled water on himself while drinking it. He immediately blamed the waiter for it without realising that the water is at no fault and he is the only one at fault. This shows the immaturity in him which gives a bad reflection to the others sitting beside.

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Again an incident occurred with the same person and on the same day while returning back from the dinner. We had to go right but unfortunately the only legal way to go right was to travel few miles and take a U-turn and come back. Instead of it he took a right turn from a temporary path made by some unknown people just to save a few minutes and few miles. The traffic on the other side was fast moving. This shows immaturity as this could have turned into an accident with severe circumstances. Attitudes are merely thoughts that you have accepted as true and that lead you to think, feel or act positively or negatively toward a person, idea or event. They represent an emotional readiness to behave in a particular manner. One is not born with these thoughts, they are learned. Therefore, you learn new attitudes and/ or change old one (Brandt, 2008). Interestingly, if we can identify a bad attitude and make the effort to change it, life will quickly cooperate with that effort, bringing luck into our lives. You can have a positive attitude. Sometimes you would prefer to see the world through clear glasses, and not rose coloured ones.

A service engineer was frightened about meeting large consumers of the automotive products. He felt it was a waste of time if he made efforts to approach the company since the company was too large to penetrate. As a result, he was not able to grab the service contracts and provide better service with the large client.

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However, after some time, he was able to change his attitude for working with these large clients. And not to be shocked, he got astonished when the large customer who turned him down several times in the previous years gave the contract to him to provide service, placed a huge order for service of the fleet of vehicle owned by the company.

Work-Life balance is a concept including prioritizing between work on one hand and life on the other hand (Milner, 2009).

In my opinion, my friend was able to nicely balance his work and life. Due to his hard work and sincere dedication towards works, he used to finish of the work well before time. As the company policies we were working in were in the interest of both the employees and the employer. We were assigned tasked which was required to completed in a given spam of time. My fellow colleague used to always finish the work well before time due to his good command over the knowledge required and good command over computer tools. Balancing work and life was easy for him as used to have more time to spend on life (Health, pleasure, leisure, family, etc.) due to his ability to complete the task well before time and use the free time to enjoy life. Ethics refer to principles that define behaviour as right, good and proper. Ethics determine where you draw the line between right and wrong (Brandt, 2008).

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From my past experience with a former employer, the employer accused a fellow employee of theft of cash missing from the safe, who was also a friend of mine. In the above circumstances, my loyalty to my employer was challenged with the loyalty to my friend. As the employer did not investigate in a fair manner and was adamant to the thought that my fellow friend has done this and could not think that it could someone else, which in turn challenged my ethical standards of justice and impartiality. At a later stage while giving the above case a thought, I could imagine that I could also be the next one to be accused without conducting proper investigating of other employees including the relatives of the employer working in the company. Thinking logically it was somehow impossible to find who took the money, the employer should have taken appropriate steps to insure that the same does not happen again in the coming future and should not have made unfounded accusations. There were many other situations which challenged my ethics and forced me to come to a conclusion that I cannot work with someone whose ethics are so different from my own. Motivation can be defined as the inner propelling force or impetus prompted by an inner persuasion, incentive or reason giving the person the prompting to be energized to act in a

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certain way (Simons, 1999). Motivation can also be defined as the influence that account for the initiation, direction, intensity, and persistence of behaviour (Brandt, 2008).

The assistant service manager who was handling a team was highly self-motivated person who wanted to rise to the top most level of the organisation as soon as possible. He always reaches office in time and follows each and every rules told by the company. He used to work very hard and always had an expectation that his team also works as hard as he is. Everyone in the team was not able to cope with the expectations of the assistant service manager. He used to constantly follow up with the team member not able to perform as per his expectations. He used to always lead by example and though that everyone would eventually be able to cope up with him. Then suddenly the unexpected happens. The assistant service manager starts coming late to office due to some family problems, breaking one of the rules. Everyone starting getting annoyed as rest all used to be on time due to him. This resulted in everyone caring less what he used to tell about the rules to be followed. It eventually showed that he used to care more about the rules than the needs to the team. The team members who got demotivated due to the above reason eventually started decreasing the motivation of the other also. Self-Concept is the bundle of facts, opinions, belief and perception about yourself that are present in your life every moment of every day (Brandt, 2008).

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One day in the school a friend of mine responded to teachers attempt to help with No, I can do it myself with the attitude I can. In this above case the teacher allowed my friend to attempt to the task on his own which in turn reflected that the teacher believes in the ability of my friend to do a task. It reflects positive self-concept.

Self-Concept can act in a negative way also. On day my friend was trying to solve a puzzle and spent lot of time on it but unfortunately could not solve it. In the end, he threw away the puzzle and said I cant do it. This shows the negative side of self-concept. I would like to conclude the discussions with the very fact that lifelong learning is a very essential part of our lives and one should analyse the mistakes made by oneself. It will help to correct those mistakes in the coming life and be a nice human being to the world around you. I am myself on a road to recovery from the past mistakes made. My immaturity to blame others instead of realising that the fault lies in me, need to be improved and remembering one incident in which I improved on it. I and my friends went to hang out in the night, and unfortunately found ourselves lost in the early hours of the day. Initially I was thinking to blame my friend who had arranged for all this. But after giving it a thought I realised that actually being only the sober person in the group, I was somewhat responsible to take care of my friends. So, instead of pointing finger on my friend, I used the help of my smartphone to find the correct way out to home.

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Bibliography
Brandt, B. L. (2008). Effective Human Relations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. DuyffRL. (1999). The value of lifelong learning: Key element in professional career development. J Am Diet Assoc. Milner, A. G. (2009). Gender, Work & Organization. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Simons, H. W. (1999). The Rhetorical Turn - Invention and Persuasion in the conduct of Enquiry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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