Everyday Experience is Not Enough

A core tenet of informal and social learning is that we learn through experience. It’s the elephant in the 70-20-10 room. It’s often used as an admonishment to formal learning. Advocates of the most laissez-faire approaches informal learning suggest that given the right tools (social anyone?) employees will do just fine without all the interference by the learning department, thank you very much.

No one in their right mind would argue that experience is not a powerful teacher, or that our most valuable learning occurs while working. But it’s pretty broad generalization don’t you think? Some experiences must be more valuable than others for achieving learning and performance goals. And if so, what makes those experiences more valuable and how do we know them when we see them? Or, from the perspective of the learning professional, how can we help create the right experiences to help people develop their skills? These seem to be important questions if we are to get beyond loose approaches to informal learning…

…Please visit my new blog Performance X Design to read the remainder of this post and others.

Note: The Gram Consulting blog has been discontinued. I post blog introductions here to encourage former Gram Consulting readers to visit the new blog. All the Gram Consulting content, plus a bunch of new posts are on the new blog. Please come on over…