Learning is a Competitive Advantage

August marked the fifth birthday for The Marketing Department NZ. And what a journey its been! It seems a very long time ago I was knocking on doors asking for work.

But this post is not about how to get a start-up business off the ground (I'll save that for another time!).

I've been pondering a lot lately about my (and therefore people in general) capacity to learn.

In the five years since I set up this marketing business, it seems like I have learn to drive a million different software applications and technology gadgets.

Just for fun I'll list just a few of the new applications I've had to get my head around:
Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator
Website Content Management Systems
Accounting package
Project Management software upgrades
Publisher
Office's basic 2007 upgrades - Word, Excel, Power Point, Outlook etc.
Skype
Blogger
Twitter
Zoombrowser
HTML
Mozilla
Filezilla
Online survey tools
Google -Analytics, Adwords, Adsense, etc etc
And thats just the stuff I can name top of mind before I go and check my "all programmes" tab.

Then there's all the technical back-end things that make marketing's 'front end' look fantastic - design, composition, photography, copywriting, styles, CMS, digital printing, offset printing, PPC, Adsense - all the things that as a corporate buyer of creative marketing services I never had to worry about.

I'm resigned to the fact that stuff just keeps changing, and if you don't keep up, you get left behind.

So what's my point?

The only real competitive advantage we have as individuals or enterprises, is the ability to learn, adapt and apply.

The world WILL keep changing. We can either go with it, or get left behind.

To be successful in business - or successful in any chosen pursuit - then it's just a fact of life that you will be constantly coming up against things you need to understand, learn, and incorporate into how you do your stuff.

So get over it, and start learning!