In work, as in life, informal learning is a constant and a given. It isn’t new; it may have changed its method but not its essence since the explosion of e-learning or mobile learning. That said, is formal learning on its way out?
Morgan McCall and his colleagues working at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) are usually credited with originating the 70:20:10 Model for Learning and Development.
This guideline for developing managers says that you need to have three types of experience:
Challenging assignments (70 percent)
Developmental relationships (20 percent)
Coursework and training (10 percent)
For those of us that like our information moments with a bit more filling and a little less bread, this is the theory that the majority of learning happens through job experience, as opposed to learning from peers or in a formal learning environment.
The Education Development Center study on the same topic is similarly often quoted:
70% of workplace learning is informal in nature.
“How much of my company learning is informal?” is the wrong question and you could certainly spend a fair few dollars trying to work out the answer. The better question is “How do I engender a culture of learning in the workplace every second of every day?”
For that, we need to have a solid program of ongoing formal learning to create a culture of open minds, and a team that welcomes input and two-way feedback as part of the learning process.
We’re all hard-wired for the informal learning process and as humans we have a natural knack for it. It may be an external meeting, an internal meeting, a coffee with a colleague or a friend, something we see on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram.
What formal learning can do for you is to accelerate this process by manipulating your learning curve and giving you better practice.
Take Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory in the 19th century, and known for his discovery of the forgetting curve. Logically, he was also therefore the first person to describe the learning curve – the rate at which a person learns information.
Mathematically Speaking:
The Learning Curve is based on 2 mathematical variables:
The Learning Coefficient The number of repetitions.
Non-mathematically speaking:
Your ability to perform an action grows as you double the number of repetitions of that action at the rate specified by your Learning Coefficient.
Quite literally, practice makes perfect.
The problem with the 70:20:10 rule is that informal learning depends on how good our people are at learning how to learn, and how much practice they get.
Stands to reason that the quality of the formal learning, i.e. the 10%, will dictate the quality and rate of the 70 % and 20%.
Switch it so that it is the 10:20:70 model and now we’re talking. With the explosion of mLearning and eLearning available, formal learning is certainly affordable and accessible and the barriers have come crashing down.
Andrie Steliou
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