Learning and excellence: The importance of continuing education

We believe that learning is inextricably tied to excellence. Excellence is one of our core values and so important to our ability to provide our clients with better and better service. One of the aspects of the commercial real estate industry we enjoy the most is how widely varied it is – providing opportunities for learning and growth each and every day. The personal experience of both success and failure can often be one of life’s best teachers.

Learning is required to maintain certain licenses, but learning is so much more. Education Executive provides a great summary of the benefits of continuous learning. Learning keeps us fresh and engaged and we believe it helps us to do our jobs better and live our lives more fully.

Our “in-the-trenches” experiences are supplemented by a commitment to more formal learning. We leverage learning opportunities through national industry associations such as CCIM and NAIOP. We take the opportunity to learn from terrific local resources that also provide us with the real estate credits required for our broker designations; MNCREW and seminars from the Minnesota Real Estate Journal. We appreciate that we also get the opportunity to share and to be teachers ourselves in a number of these seminars – giving back and helping to improve the commercial real estate industry as a whole.

This past year, we invested in training for our team from the Massimo Group specifically to help our company grow. Finding learning resources in your industry can be valuable to your customers, your business and employees. In fact, as a team, we track best practices and new ideas on a shared drive as a way to provide one another with access to new information as we experience it.

That said, our company uses a number of tools to help us build team, one of which is CliftonStrengths by Gallup®. One of their defined strengths is “Learner®” defined as “People exceptionally talented in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and continuously improve.” Active and aware learning tied to continuous improvement applied to our daily work leads to excellence!

If you’re still not sold on learning as a lifelong journey, take a look at this article from Huffington Post, on how learning keeps us young!