Many of us work on our fitness nearly every day. Imagine trying to run a marathon after taking a jog just once every few months. It’s not going to go well. The same principle applies to learning – your brain needs to “workout” too. We should treat learning the same way we treat exercise — and make it a daily habit.

There are three parallels between learning and fitness, which were presented by Giuseppe Auricchio Executive Director of the Learning Innovation Unit at IESE Business School, during Degreed’s recent Lens event in NYC.

1. Transformation  by digital technologies.

Both fitness and learning are being transformed by digitalization. Think wearables. Think reading through a powerpoint on your tablet ahead of a sales presentation. Both are things we likely didn’t anticipate before they were invented, and both help us reach new heights.

2. It takes many activities to reach that common goal.

Fitness experts say you should vary your fitness routine for maximum results. The same philosophy applies to learning. More than ever, there are a significant amount of options for how you can learn, and employees are combining them to create their own maximum results. Recent research from Degreed reported that nearly 70% learn from peers or by reading articles and blogs every week, and 53% learn from videos in any given week.
 

3. You’re never done being healthy and fit, and you should never be done learning.

Both activities should last for a lifetime. Enough said.

When it comes to both  fitness and learning, the right tools are a critical component to creating daily, sustainable habits. Modern technology has gifted us things like beautiful dashboards that show data and growth over time, contextualized reminders (think: time to stand up!), and social tools that let you challenge or share with your friends. These are all things that make us more productive.

But if we take a step back, we can see that this is bigger than new tech, ease of use, multiple modalities. It’s about the new opportunities that all these things together present. The opportunity to grow and make ourselves better on our own. And the reality is, it’s time for corporate learning to follow suit and empower their employees to take learning into their own hands.

If you aren’t sure how, Degreed can help you encourage a culture of self-directed learning, with tools to discover, curate, track, measure, and reward all career and lifelong learning activities. Success for both learning and fitness are intrinsically dependent on motivation which can be difficult to sustain. But it’s important that we keep growing and moving forward, setting goals and improving ourselves as people- and those improvements will most certainly come if we can take advantage of, and create, positive daily habits.