Ha, some time this century for sure. To me it's not 'unsophisticated' exactly, but it's definitely a certain sort of person - it's the 'Hi team - just sharing some learnings - please do reach out if you have any questions' sort of corporate speak.
Yeah I love those meetings where we have to double-click on a pain point and unpack what's going on so that we can do the work and stop treading water.
Not to discredit your experience, but I'm a native English speaker and I've never had the perception that it's unsophisticated. I think they can have a very slightly different connotation from one another, but in a lot of usage I think they're interchangeable.
It's corporate-speak. There are all sorts of these things.
Lessons/learnings
Requests/asks
Solutions/solves
Agreement/alignments
It definitely sounds weird if you don't spend a lot of time in that world. It's like they replace the actual noun forms with an oddly cased verb form, i.e., nominalization.
"Aligned" is probably one of my least favorite pieces of corporate lingo to become popular. Makes me imagine a D&D alignment chart and all the black and white thinking that comes with that.
And lessons is academy/state school-speak. Can't stand the word. Take your lessons home Ms Teacher, this is a place of business.
Edit: funny how this is down voted but the corporate speak comment not :) we use the word learnings at home. It means what you have learned yourself, as opposed to getting a lesson about it.
This is why people have adopted corp speak. They're traumatized by words and need to replace them to help with their ptsd. In 10 years "learnings" will be replaced by something like "considerations" or "updates" when zoomer managers get to set the rules.
I’m a native English speaker too, and my immediate reaction when hearing another native speaker say “learnings” is to think they’re an idiot. I know they might be a non-idiot who just happens to talk that way so I try herd not to judge.
Still, the bottom line is that making nouns of verbs for words for which more commonly used nouns already exist makes a poor impression on many speakers.
I’m a native English speaker and don’t use the phrase, but I’ve always thought that a lesson is something taught, but a learning is something learned. The former does not always imply the latter.
Thanks for your feedback on the title of my article. English is not my first language, and in my native tongue, the distinction between “learnings” and “lessons” isn’t as pronounced in this type of context. I appreciate the nuanced perspective and will probably update my title . My main goal is to share the experiences we’ve gathered over the years, and I hope that the essence of our journey with Kubernetes shines through, regardless of the terminology.
As others said, I'm not sure it's quite unsophisticated but you're not too far off. It's a specific jargon that comes from people I might perhaps consider unsophisticated if I'm in a bad mood, but more likely they're just happy to be politically correct in a fairly harmless manner.
I feel like it's used because "lessons" may imply judgment to some people?
I feel like the word unambiguously describes exactly what it is, which is all I can really ask for from a word.
"Lesson" by itself might connote a more concrete transmission of knowledge (like a school lesson). Which is a meaningful distinction if the goal of the article is merely to muse about lessons they've learned rather than imply that this is a lesson from the writers to the audience. "Lesson learned" could imply the same thing, but is longer to say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I get what the comments here are saying about it sounding corporate, but I think this is a unique situation where this word actually makes sense.
Those are really American though.. like "co-worker", that isn't a word which was used in England. We'd use "colleague". It came from American English as part of the corporate lingo.
This particular case may not be a good example, but Brits tend to forget that they actually invented some of the words that they blame Americans for. Soccer is a perfect example, though I think the "Lost in the Pond" YouTube channel has a video or three with several more.
I’d say your likelihood of being misread or of giving a poor impression by using the word increases with the distance to the nearest person (other than you) holding an MBA.
It's not that. I'm American and I've never heard anyone use "learnings" instead of "lessons". It has to be coming from a specific subculture, though I have no idea where.
It's very much just bro corporate speak, if I heard someone use "learnings" instead of "lessons" irl they would definitely fall into the slot for a specific type of person in my head. Very LinkedIn.