What informal learning is, what the benefits are, and how to apply it at your organization
We learn nearly all the time. Through conversations, videos, quick reads, reflection, sharing, and other ways. Traditional definitions may confine the scope to a designated place, like a school or a workplace. That’s where formal learning happens, which has limitations.
Informal learning breaks these barriers and unleashes the unlimited potential and seamless avenues for learning. When we apply this paradigm to corporate learning, L&D must blend both worlds to realize the real benefits. While formal learning might help set the direction, informal learning helps execute it in its own rhythm and style.
It promotes the notion of a lifelong learning culture that can significantly meet the skills gap. The role of L&D rests in nurturing this inquisitive understanding to explore and learn more. This can mean providing the environment to unleash the social learning and self-learning side of the employee.
Most professionals are familiar with formal learning. It’s usually delivered face-to-face or through online training, with L&D departments setting goals and objectives on behalf of employees and creating courses and classroom training for them.
Informal learning occurs away from a structured, formal classroom environment. It comes in many forms, including viewing videos, self-study, reading articles, participating in forums and chat rooms, performance support, coaching sessions, and games. There is usually no formal structure, curriculum, expert trainer who teaches students, or legal recognition of completion like a certificate or diploma. Informal learning is a style in which the learner sets their own goals and objectives.
Since the early days of e-learning, L&D has mainly focused on formal learning, with Learning Management Systems (LMS) as a tool to push learners’ content. This took up a significant share of the L&D budget. The late e-learning pioneer Jay Cross, best known for his workplace learning approach, did a lot to promote the idea that there’s more to L&D than formal methods. His view was that learning is not about transferring knowledge but about performing and working better.
Nowadays, employees have the internet to find the information they require. So they are used to satisfying their own learning needs. Hence, many L&D departments are moving their focus away from formal learning. Thanks to Jay Cross and others’ groundlaying work, organizations shift their attention and budgets to informal learning instead.
Formal training is essential for businesses because each industry has an established set of rules and procedures that employees must follow. For instance, compliance, security, and onboarding are some of the mandatory and popular HR training programs in a formal classroom setup. But informal learning covers a vast ground for employees outside the scheduled agenda. It offers an excellent opportunity for the HR department to create processes to monitor and optimize employee development. And that’s just one way in which companies can embrace informal learning.
Even though informal learning has an unplanned and flexible nature, there are theories that backs it up. The theories about it lay out how informal learning can be applied and used to improve employees’ every day work on the short and long term.
Self-directed learning describes how learners diagnose their needs, formulate their goals, devise their learning methods, and handle learning independently without any support from formal learning regimes.
According to this school of theories, informal learning that occurs in the workplace context is related to an employee’s job and is usually not planned by the employer. It is about employees developing and improving skills and growing their knowledge while they are at work.
Social learning is a spontaneous practice rooted in everyday behaviours at work, and outside of work. Peer interactions, like conversations, imitation, observing, are a catalyst to foster social learning and contribute to the sharing of knowledge.
All ways of informal learning are closely related to our popular 70:20:10 model for L&D. In fact, it is part of it and adds the value of the first two parts of the model that state that:
That means that 90% of learning comes through informal learning, at and outside of work. The other way of learning, the most traditional way, formal learning, only takes up 10% of all learning.
Informal learning influences L&D in several ways and we can point out four trends that are rooted in informal learning practices and have a real impact.
Informal learning is the opposite of formal learning, which is usually delivered face-to-face or through online training and typically controlled by L&D. Informal learning is not planned or organized top-down. It just happens whenever it’s needed.
A traditional, top-down approach of L&D delivering and administering training is shifting rapidly towards a bottom-up approach. Companies now encourage workers to be accountable for their learning. Bottom-up or employee-driven learning is at the heart of informal learning.
Performance support focuses on improving work, while training focuses on the learning required to do the job. This requires contextually-embedded tools and content that employees use in the moment of need, without interrupting their workflow. This is a significant trend in the L&D space. Learning in the context of work without a planned agenda is a classic trait of informal learning.
There’s a significant difference between having the skills to do something and knowing how to do it. A key trend in L&D is to prioritize skills over knowledge because it’s essential to be able to apply something, to show different behavior. As mentioned above, informal learning activities fit easily into a workday and are associated with solving the problem at hand spontaneously. This is related to working out one’s actionable skills to get the job done.
Informal learning occurs in many ways and takes a lot of shapes. Mainly, there are five examples of how employees can practice informal learning:
The following situations show how employees can apply these examples of informal learning.
Informal learning approaches are common throughout most work environments. They can happen in the break room or the hallway just as frequently as in the conference room. These are a few illustrations of informal learning in the workplace:
Feel like you want to embrace informal learning at you organization more? Great, we can only encourage that! Apply this strategy to make it a successful experience for everyone.
Informal learning is devised and executed by employees without any guidance or from L&D. It is entirely driven by employees who wish to learn and solve the challenges at work using their self-discovery or social skills. This self-paced tempo works wonders as long as you align it with your business goals. Hence, it is vital to keep the communication transparent with the employees regularly, inform them about goals, identify skill gaps, and collaboratively decide which activities are useful to meet your goals.
Informal learning thrives by having the right information at hand at the right moment, which requires a support system. On the one hand, it is essential to provide easily accessible and findable information to employees to support their job performance in the work context. On the other hand, it is equally important to provide the tools for them to share their best practices, which in turn feeds the knowledge ecosystem.
L&D can create the structure and initiate content into it, but in general – the best and most useful knowledge comes in from the employees. Hence, providing the right content creation tools to capture the knowledge as short nuggets of content or resources is crucial for a healthy content system.
Finding information, solving problems, getting advice from colleagues, trying new solutions – these are some of the inadvertent processes happening informally on the floor. The modern workforce doesn’t seek or wait for consent to get going, and L&D and the managers must come together to create a structure for the informal learning happening on the job. As managers and L&D have the bird’s eye view of the overall business goals, the teams, employee strengths, and projects, they are in a great position to map the right people to the right opportunities of learning.
Social learning activities like mentoring are a brilliant training ground for many employees to leverage a veteran’s knowledge. L&D can facilitate informal learning, and seasoned employees can share their knowledge and pass their wisdom to less experienced colleagues. Similarly, roping in employees into new assignments beyond their normal remit of work can be hugely inspiring for them to learn and grow. Leverage on your LMS or LXP or intranets’ collaboration features to provide connections, discussions, curation, and active participation.
It’s important to measure all your work’s progress, so you can steer it in the right direction. But how do you do that? Here are a few ideas:
Informal learning is precious for your organization. It comes with various benefits, such as:
While it is an accepted fact that informal learning could happen for any duration and context, you can usually find the optimal moments for it when employees are in the flow of work. Picture this: you are onboarding a new employee to the core products with e-learning modules. He or she may want some answers about the products’ application side before, during, or after the modules. They could be preparatory, on the fly, or a follow-up. This is the opportunity for L&D to nurture the informal learning drive in the employee by providing the nuggets of information or the tools to check or people to connect to get questions clarified.
As a starting point, we often advise L&D to channel the existing expertise of senior employees and capture it in consumable content forms and formats. These quick doses of information will be beneficial while solving an issue at work. What are these forms, and how can L&D create them? The answer rests in the natural and informal behaviors of how subject matter experts typically share their knowledge. They share quick links or crisp how-to procedures or reference guides, or short checklists on various aspects of their work.
The idea is to capture these knowledge capsules and disseminate them to wider networks closing the knowledge gap faster. L&D must invest in the right content creation or authoring tools to be able to capture and share this tactical knowledge that can fulfill the performance support needs of the organization. The tools must be easy to use for busy employees who can share what they know informally. This experience should be as seamless and fluid as their own informal, impromptu, spontaneous learning moment itself.
Kasper Spiro is the Co-founder and Chief learning strategist of Easygenerator and a recognized thought leader in the world of e-learning. With over 30 years of experience, he is a frequently requested keynote speaker and well-renowned blogger within the e-learning community.
