As this infographic shows, roughly 46% of employees spend anywhere from one to 30 minutes per day on informal learning. Informal learning entails learners taking more control of their learning. It entails them choosing the learning content they want to consume from various sources, based on their interests, preferences, and relevance. Informal learning happens in the workplace every day and will only become more prevalent as technology advances.
Here’s a brief synopsis of what you need to know about informal learning methods.
Informal Learning Is Valuable for Employees and Employers Alike
Here’s how informal learning is valuable for employees:
- Learning is entirely driven by them so they become more engaged with the material they’re encountering and may even have fun while they’re learning.
- Because it’s self-guided, employees can learn anything they want at their own pace. And they won’t have to worry about taking tests or quizzes.
- Informal learning allows employees to stay on top of trends and topics that interest them, and they don’t have to wait for new courses to be developed.
Here’s how informal learning is valuable for employers:
- Informal learning can facilitate a learning strategy for an organization.
- When informal learning is encouraged across an organization, it promotes curiosity and innovation, as well as a deep-seated learning culture.
- Employees who collaborate often can further their knowledge of skills and best practices when everyone is engaging in informal learning.
You Can Use Informal Learning to Create Formal Learning Programs
As a learning and development professional, you strive to create learning material that is beneficial to your learners. One of the best ways to see what types of training and development will help them is to see what informal learning they’re currently relying on or seeking out.
Distribute self-assessments and questionnaires periodically so employees can tell you more about the informal learning they’ve engaged in recently and what they’ve learned. You can always test their knowledge on the things they’ve claimed to have learned to see if their resources or self-guided training was reliable. You can also host coaching and mentoring sessions, where employees share new things they’ve learned outside of the formal learning environment at work. Take all this information and use it to develop more learning material and programs that are centered around what employees are wanting to learn more about—learning materials that will help them at their current job or help them advance in their careers.
Having an LMS with a Robust Content Library Helps Manage Informal Learning
If you provide ample resources for your employees to refer to when they want to learn more about a particular topic or subject, you can better manage their informal learning and how they approach it. Host a multitude of learning resources, including content files, videos, courses, and more in your LMS (Learning Management System). And curate content from reputable outside sources so you don’t have to create all your learning content from scratch. The more learning resources you have, the better. As employees start to use your content library and access your learning resources, they’ll start to rely less and less on external resources.
Use informal learning to your advantage and to the advantage of your organization by keeping the information above in mind as you develop your learning and development and training programs.