Informal and Inexpensive: Learning's New Territory

Pssst. Over here. We hear you're looking for a good deal these days. The word is that you want to rev up your organizational performance without spending a lot of extra cash. Turns out, we might have just the thing for you: informal learning, aka social learning.

Sure, you might already know a thing or two about social learning, but the research on this subject is just heating up, and most companies haven't leveraged it nearly as well as they might, according to Tapping the Potential of Informal Learning, a major study commissioned by the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) and conducted by i4cp.

This kind of learning tends to take place without a conventional instructor, with employees in charge of everything from the timing of the learning to how deep they want to go into a given subject. Examples include online social networking, accessing "fingertip" knowledge through the Internet, and peer-to-peer coaching.

"Informal and social learning are increasingly important tools to provide continuous knowledge to the workplace, leveraging the wisdom of colleagues and developing rapid, useful content in tight economic times," notes Elliott Masie, chair of the Learning CONSORTIUM and an i4cp board member.

Jay Cross, another expert in the field and author of Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance, also views informal learning as a cost-effective strategy. "All learning is part formal and part informal," he told i4cp. "It's not either/or. The economy is forcing corporations to do less with more, and some of the smart ones are shifting the balance in favor of more informal."

Cross argues that this is how many employees want to glean new information. "Workers are embracing self-service learning; they learn in the context of work, not at some training event divorced from work. Their learning is curriculum-free. Embedding learning in work reduces overall spending while improving performance. Abandoning obsolete notions of training cuts costs. Relying on natural, peer-based learning improves business results."

The ASTD/i4cp study, based on a survey of over 1,100 business and learning professionals, supports the notion that companies get a sizable bang for their buck when it comes to informal learning. That's especially true for learning functions, which tend to allocate little, if any, of their budget to informal learning. Over a third (36%) of participants said their training budgets don't allocate anything to informal learning, and another 42% say they allocate only between 1% and 10% of their budget to such learning.

Yet, companies derive a lot of value from informal learning. Most respondents to the study said that such learning enhances performance to at least a moderate extent, with 46% saying it does so to a high or very high extent. What's more, the study found a significant correlation between the degree to which informal learning occurs in organizations and their reported market performance.

By some estimates, informal learning already represents the majority of learning in today's organization. "ASTD estimates that at least 70% of learning within an organization is informal or social learning," notes Tony Bingham, president and CEO of ASTD. And the ASTD/i4cp study shows that the usage of such learning is only going to grow in coming years, with 56% of participants projecting that, as a proportion of all learning in their organizations, informal learning will increase over the next three years.

But getting maximum value from such learning isn't as easy as it might sound. Not all informal or social learning is created equal, and companies need to use it wisely. For example, the study indicates that employees actually overuse informal learning in the area of getting information on internal politics, and they utilize such learning to about the right extent in areas such as educating workers in how to use office equipment or determining administrative requirements such as timekeeping and expense tracking. Meanwhile, social learning is drastically underutilized in crucial areas such as deriving insights from experienced employees, sharing best practices, and sharing lessons learned when errors have occurred and/or corrections have been made.

This last point is particularly noteworthy in light of another recent i4cp study. It found that a vast majority of respondents (86%) say there's going to be an "increased emphasis on productivity" in their organizations over the first half of 2009. When asked about how they were going to achieve increases, the top answer was that they're going to work smarter, fine-turning their work processes. The ASTD/i4cp study indicates that most organizations could accomplish this better if they'd make greater use of knowledge sharing.

Organizations must also become savvier about how to make use of many social networking technologies. ASTD's Tony Bingham notes, "It's interesting that at TechKnowledge 2009 in Las Vegas - an event attended by many who are very comfortable using technologies in learning - less than 10% of the audience was using Twitter (as an example) or had even examined how it might be able to support learning. The challenge is that many of our incoming workers are extremely comfortable using Web technologies for learning, and the profession must adapt to support these individuals. How it develops in organizations is up to us - so, we are encouraging all members of the learning community to actively learn about and implement tools to support social learning."

Not only do organizations need to get better at using such tools, they need to draw a better bead on how well informal learning tools and techniques are actually working. Some observers believe that trying to measure the effectiveness of informal or social learning is a fool's errand, an endeavor that is impossible and might even discourage employers from using such techniques. The ASTD/i4cp study shows, however, that all surveyed methods of measuring the effectiveness of such learning are significantly correlated with reported market performance, and most are linked to a greater usage of informal learning. So, while using these metrics is still uncommon, there may be advantages to measuring success in these areas.

These and other findings suggest that informal or social learning practices can help - especially in a tough economy where training dollars are scarce - but there's a real art to using these techniques well. Organizations that spend some time mastering those techniques are the most likely to get a significant return on their investment.

For more information on this topic, register for i4cp's Social & Informal Learning: The Business Opportunity webinar, presented by renowned futurist Elliott Masie and i4cp CEO Kevin Oakes.

Documents used in the preparation of this TrendWatcher include the following:

• American Society for Training & Development. (2008). Tapping the potential of informal learning: An ASTD research study. View more information on this and other ASTD research reports.