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Features

Published October 2008

Hands Off: Facilitating Informal Learning

  

  Agatha Gilmore

Informal learning accounts for the majority of employee development, but many organizations still struggle with how to address and measure it.

It’s a fairly typical scenario: An employee is plugging away at her desk, researching a project or going through industry reports, when she comes across unfamiliar terminology. A quick Google search turns up a few possibilities, but to make sure she understands the term in the context of her business, she queries a co-worker via an instant message. Her peer quickly confirms the accurate meaning, and she gets back to her project.

Though no one really stops to think about it, what the employee did was engage in informal learning. In a 1996 report, the U.S. Department of Labor estimated that about 70 percent of all the learning that occurs in any given organization can be considered informal. What exactly is it?

“It’s the process of learning on the job: interacting with your peers, interacting with your customers and suppliers, and finding out new things that help you be more effective,” said A.G. Lambert, vice president at Saba.

Jay Cross — CEO of learning solutions provider Internet Time Group and a thought leader on informal learning — summed it up succinctly: “Informal learning is the stuff that happens when there’s no curriculum.”

Yet, while most organizations spend ample time and money devising ways to educate their workforces using classroom training and e-learning sessions, many don’t have systems in place to encourage or capture the sharing that happens outside of the classroom. Or if they do, the efforts often fall into the knowledge management category, thereby squelching the informal aspect.

John Talanca, director of global learning and head of learning technologies at pharmaceutical company Novartis, said this was the case at his company.

“Our early entry into informal learning [was] you would share a best practice. It was a very structured type of Web site approach, and oftentimes, that best practice had to be reviewed by someone,” he said. “So right away you’re starting to lose some of the informality because it was putting too much structure around it. Moving forward, what we really realized is we wanted to take advantage of other tools that allowed the employees in our company to more proactively offer up this information.”

Indeed, experts agree the key to fostering successful informal learning in an organization is to promote and facilitate the discussion, not manage it.

“Facilitation is about putting in place the minimum level of systems and processes and providing, in some cases, evangelism to build energy around the subject without going too far in terms of trying to get in the middle of every discussion,” said Nick Howe, vice president of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Academy.

It’s a hard line to draw, but there are several ways organizations can leverage informal learning without overstepping their bounds.