Flexibility, Curiosity and Knowledge: Learning Agility in Animal Health Job Interviews

Job hunting in animal health? Interviewers need to understand more than your expertise, motivations, and cultural fit. They want to assess your learning agility. How can you show that you have what it takes?

What is learning agility?

Learning agility is the ability to take lessons from your experiences, both good and bad, and apply them in the future by changing your mindset and your actions. People with high learning agility maximize the benefits of working with colleagues who think differently.

Learning agility includes mental agility, people skills, the ability to embrace and handle change and produce results, as well as a high degree of self-awareness.

Learning agility can be thought of as two roads: The straight road to expertise leads to deeper learning in a single area. The winding road to general knowledge leads to skills in a range of topics or areas. A company needs the right mix of associates at different points on both roads to perform at its best.

Why is learning agility important for jobs in animal health?

Along with strong cognitive ability and high emotional intelligence, job candidates with high learning agility are more likely to succeed; they are promoted twice as quickly as their less-agile counterparts.

The animal health business is filled with change. New companies, new technologies and new challenges emerge all the time. Companies can only thrive in this changeable industry if their employees can learn and grow to face the business challenges. Agile executives can lead their companies to as much as 25% higher profit margins.

What job interview questions assess learning agility?

Interviewers explore learning agility with situational questions that probe for its different aspects.

Flexibility Your interviewer may ask you to describe a situation that didn’t go according to plan, like a situation when you missed an important goal or timeline. They want to see evidence of how you adapted when everything didn’t go perfectly. If you spend time with animals, you’ll have a few of these!

Curiosity and learning Your interviewer will ask how you handled a project or task relating to an area about which you knew very little. They want to know if this challenge was exciting or terrifying, how you learned new skills to succeed, and what you learned from the process. Your answer can also give them insight into your cognitive abilities – how quickly and easily you learn.

Communication Rather than just asking you to describe your communication style, an interviewer looking for evidence of learning agility will ask you how you overcame a cultural barrier, or how you collaborate with people whose styles differ from your own.

How can you prepare for learning agility questions?

Learning agility assessments are part of most animal health interviews. To answer questions about your learning agility, prepare short summaries of relevant experiences. Be able to describe the challenge, how you dealt with it and what you learned in one to two minutes.

Think back over your career – all the way back to the beginning. What experiences stand out? What were the challenges and the successes, whether large or small? Use these as the basis for your success stories; prepare answers that describe them from multiple perspectives.

Show us what you’ve learned

Learning agility is an important factor in determining a candidate’s likelihood of success in a role. As you prepare for your next interview in the animal health industry, be sure that you can demonstrate yours. Select your best examples, create your success stories, and practice using them to answer questions. Then show us what you can do!

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