An analyst reports that her company’s research finds that only 30% of U.S. companies spent money on informal learning tools or services last year. Of those, big companies spent $16,000 on average; little ones spent $5600.
What an astounding finding! The only way I can imagine coming up with these absurdly low statistics would be by asking the wrong people. L&D people.
Most informal learning takes place despite training departments, not because of them. Informal learning is mushrooming as organizations implement social software. It’s hard to imagine informal learning not going along for the ride when a company embraces Jive or Chatter or Yammer or Socialcast or similar networking environments.
Hi Jay, maybe we should look at the category of informal spending. I am not sure most companies realize how much informal learning is going on and where investments are supporting it. A lot of informal learning goes on despite the company and or training department.
Jeff
Hi there,
I’m new to the area of teaching and training but this post has really got me thinking. I assume that by informal learning you are referring to something such as running to the internet to get ideas or questions answered that you may not find at your physical disposal. In the field of Instructional Design there is so much to learn and a great deal of creativity goes into it as well. With so many designers having blogs you can gain so many more tools from a sea of designers than from the small confines of ones department or school.
the question is, how do you run reports an dmetrics on Social/informal learning? its very hard to capture.
There is a movement into “competency based” performance in education and the workplace. As this moves in, the need to validate learning via external credentialing diminishes. The most interesting arena where this has worked is in the area of medical professionals. Few ask the surgeon where s/he graduated in her class or how many continuing education courses they have taken. In some academic institutions, credit by experience is becoming more prevalent which is frightening to the business models for universities. Perhaps the same is happening in the pvt sector to an HR dept that has sunk costs in facilities and staff overhead.
What happens is that the employee’s skill sets are measured by performance on the job rather than external certification. This is happening in primary/secondary education where schools have determined that continuing education for promotion and pay raises and measured by certificates or credits do not contribute measurably to increased performance in the classroom.
Most are familiar with the Results Only Work Environment pioneered at Best Buy which is the paradigmatic example of how individuals will be measured and which will drive employees to seek that knowledge which is needed to maintain their performance on the job whether it is via formal or informal vehicles.
In The Academy, open access learning eventually forces universities, for example, to change their business model and, up to now has left them with “certification” as their principle value where classes are the path to certification. As we move to competencies that model is weakened in academia but even more so in the work place.
I find your post to be very interesting. I wonder how the companies that took part in the survey actually understand what the concept means, as the term can be very subjective. You would not believe the informal training I get listening to the other teachers gossip in the hallway. All kidding aside, an additional question would be whether the companies are aware of the informal learning that occurs every day?