Jay Cross helps people work and live smarter. Jay is the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning. He wrote the book on it. He was the first person to use the term eLearning on the web. He has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix.
When the book on informal learning came out, nay-sayers attacked me as some kind of loony. Some still do. I’ve got a thick skin.
QUESTION: How do you know that informal learning works?
ANSWER: How did you learn to walk and talk? How did you learn to kiss?
QUESTION: How can you measure what people learn?
ANSWER: By judging what they do. Has their performance improved?
QUESTION: How can we assess the ROI of informal learning?
ANSWER: Cost-benefit analysis. But hold it, how to you assess the ROI of formal learning?
QUESTION: How do you know learning on the job is 80% informal?
ANSWER: Study after study arrives at that figure but it’s a generality. It depends on the context: what’s to be learned, who’s learning it, and where’s the learner starting from. The important thing is that informal learning is too important to overlook.
QUESTION: Do you want a doctor or pilot who learned informally?
ANSWER: Informal learning is only part of the solution. I want my doctors and pilots to have learned both formally and through experience. Yes, I want them to engage in frequent conversation with their peers.
QUESTION: How do you know if people really learn this way?
ANSWER: You ask them how they learned to do what they’re doing. Studies find that only 15% of what’s learning in formal workshops shows up as changed behavior on the job. Can informal learning do any worse?
Despite the criticism, many readers were very supportive. I expected managers and executives to flock to informal learning. Corporations leave money on the table — lots of it — by not investing in the combination of working and learning that really works.
What happened? Not much. Companies continued to put almost all of the training budget into schooling novices. They acted as if the natural way of informal learning didn’t exist. Or was someone else’s responsibility. They largely squandered the opportunity to increase their effectiveness by becoming networked learning organizations. I think I’ve figured out why.
Schooling
Business people confuse learning with schooling.
For the better part of twenty years, school indoctrinated us that formal learning was the legitimate way to learn, that teachers and books provided the knowledge one needed to master, and that grades were the measure of accomplishment.
It’s easy to poke fun at the foibles of schooling. Learning is active and most schooling is passive. What’s taught in school is often superficial, boring, and irrelevant. Since school learning isn’t reinforced in real life, most of what’s learned is forgotten before it can be put to use. Could you pass your college’s final exams? Grades that once seemed so important turn out to be meaningless outside of school systems.
Nonetheless, most corporate training departments are modeled on schools. They deal with learners who are enrolled. They provide top-down classes and rigid content. They take attendance, administer tests, and certify participation. They let non-training learning fall between the cracks.
The Road Not Taken
Nick Shackleton-Jones commented on a post on Jane Hart’s blog about this topic:
I replied:
David Price followed up:
Trust is at the heart of this. If you don’t trust people to do what’s right, you can’t support informal learning. We’ll return to this subject.
In the next couple of posts, I’m going to point out how the world has changed since the book came out and things I’d do differently were I writing the book today.
Previously
Informal Learning is Business
Let’s Put Informal Learning to Work
Welcome to Jay’s hangout on the web! There’s a lot underneath the hood here. I’ve been blogging more than a dozen years. Go to “coordinates” for a list of what to check out and how to get in touch. Don’t miss the Important Stuff collection.
Interesting points Jay. A lot of L&D/Training departments are still trying to ‘control’ informal education rather than support and facilitate it. We need to move as a profession away from course delivery to learning facilitation. Your work helps to move us in that direction.
@StephenWHart
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