What can neuroscience teach us about the first 30 days in a new job?

Congratulations on your new role!  Get ready to learn. You may have thought you won the role because you have the knowledge, skills and experience required but the reality is the next 30 days will be a time of massive learning of new knowledge, developing new skills and building new experience.

A new job means learning the new organisation - familiarising yourself, not just with the processes, the people and the past, but importantly the organisational culture.  You may also be learning a new location, possibly a new country culture.  And all this learning needs to take place while you prove yourself as the best person for the role by performing effectively. 

This level of learning challenge involves significant work for our brain.  While our brain is an amazing organ, with billions of nerve fibres working to fulfil an extensive array of functions, storing the equivalent of a petabyte of data; the pre-frontal cortex - the part of our brain responsible for conscious thought (learning, understanding, memorizing and remembering) - is a relatively small component and is very energy hungry. And a new job means the pre-frontal cortex is constantly stimulated by new information that needs to be noticed, recognised, understood, remembered or sometimes ignored.

The risk of focusing on novel but not helpful information is high, as is the risk of overwhelm from new information.  This can lead to low retention and to brain exhaustion depleting our ability to make good decisions as the day goes on.

So, what can we do to help and support our brain in the learning process?

Click to read more ...

What is happening in the expat brain?

We know a lot about the brain, about how it learns and how it embeds the learning, building new neural patterns and pathways as it does so.  We know the optimal conditions for learning to be retained and remembered.

We know that this is exactly what expats need. To learn fast- and to retain the learning. 

It’s continuous learning over a whole range of aspects. From day-to-day learning like new currencies and driving rules, to spatial learning – creating the mental maps to orient themselves in their new environment, to language learning and different styles of communication, to work effectiveness with adaptations to management styles, appropriate ways to lead, influence and relate with each level of the organization – so much to learn!

The beginning of an expat assignment is continuous, non-stop, learning.

But it’s not just absorbing content –it’s also having the insight to recognise when to adapt and when to operate as you might at home. 

Neuroscience has uncovered some of the optimal conditions for learning to be retained and remembered.  How can this research help the expat brain?

Click to read more ...