Why learn if you know that you won’t be using your knowledge? This is a question that has been going through my mind for a while.
When you are first born, your family treats you like a baby, teach you everything about morals, give you all the good knowledge you could ever get and then they send you to a school and college so you can go pursue the career of your dreams or the career that was forced on you due to GPA or circumstances.
And then you start working in an organization–that could be small or big, national or multinational- and you find yourself forced to work in tasks that you have never ever heard anything about, and you start from scratch as a baby in the company to learn and gain all the company’s knowledge. And even though you might know all the updated knowledge and expertise required in a certain field; still sometimes you are forced to throw away everything you know in the basket and do only what you are told to do, cause your manager just isn’t up to date with the latest knowledge as much as you are and he might not accept the fact that you know something he/she doesn’t.
I find it’s a sort of killing knowledge, ,because whatever you are going to learn in this country it will be useless, each time you learn something and you don’t use it, you get a little bit more rusty, just like when you buy a new metal product then leave it in the air, it will definitely rust. You too with time you will turn to be uneducated although you might be holding a master’s degree or a PhD in a field because you were misused by your knowledge. Deep down you know that you can change the world with your education and thinking but your manager gives you a donkey routine job that doesn’t need thinking at all, so in time you turn out to be just an average worker who is paid by the hour for doing something.
Even though all this might push a lot of people to just get up and leave, I still don’t like the idea of traveling away and starting a new career and new life in a new place to solve the problem because you might find the same problem out there maybe not that much but it might exist, or some other problem might exist out there.
I believe that trying to train or update an old school manager will be harder than expected probably because he/she was not made a manager for this era.
I think the best solution is to make a small game we all used to play when we were young, the musical chair, an employee will have a chance to be manager or team leader or head of department, on the other hand the current managers will turn to be employees and start learning from the up to date school. Nothing wrong with that.
This will give a chance to everyone to be a “Joker” a person who knows everything about everything or a “Generalist” as many people call them.
By: Ahmed Mohamed Hassan
Editor: Rana Kamaly
Design: Mayar A. El Farkh