Informal learning is having a moment right now, and it's about time.
As learning professionals, we can often get caught up in designing, developing, and implementing formal learning experiences, which can cause informal learning to fall to the wayside and easily be overlooked. However, informal learning experiences can have major, long-term effects on learning and business outcomes, so finding creative ways to track them can be valuable for L&D departments.
What is informal learning?
Informal learning is learning that is unstructured and self-directed. This is a broad definition, and there are different types of informal learning, but for our contexts, this definition will suffice.
So, what does this look like in practice? Informal learning can be:
- Job aids that learners can find for themselves
- Social learning groups like communities of practice or mentoring groups
- Discussion boards or forum posting
- Taking eLearning that has not been directly assigned to the learner
Each of these is an example of self-directed learning that happens within the flow of the learner's daily experiences. A person who is interested in bringing a particular new AI technology into their company and who:
- Does their own research on products that are available
- Reads about others' experiences using the technology
- Takes a course on LinkedIn Learning about it
- Refers to their company's AI policy
Would be actively engaging in informal learning.
Why track informal learning?
About a year ago, I worked with a learning and sales enablement (LSE) team to develop a series of certification courses for the company's yearly kickoff event. These certifications were required for certain people attending the kickoff, but not for everyone.
As their learning management consultant, I began to notice that several people who were not required to take the certification courses had enrolled themselves. This presented an opportunity to demonstrate the value of the LSE team.
I pulled reports on who was assigned to take the training, compared them to reports of everyone who was taking the training, and pulled out the names of those who were not assigned. I then gave those names to the LSE team, and they tracked the performance and sales numbers of these individuals over the next six months and compared them to similar colleagues who had not self-enrolled in the training.
What was found was the learners who engaged in the content of their own volition tended to have stronger sales numbers and customer satisfaction ratings than those who did not. In other words, those who participated in informal learning had higher job performance than those who did not.
These results were shown to company leaders to not only demonstrate the worth of the learning content being produced but also tangibly reinforce the need to develop and support a learning culture within the company.
Tracking informal learning
One of the reasons that many L&D professionals avoid tracking informal learning is that it seems more difficult than tracking formal learning. It's easy to pull LMS reports to monitor how long people are in your courses or completion rates. It's standard procedure to gather feedback results after a webinar or workshop. But how do you track learning that is inherently unstructured?
I encourage learning and development departments to employ these three methods.
1. Leverage the LMS
There are several LMS and LXP companies out there with gamification and social learning options, but you don't need extra features to monitor informal learning. In my previous example, I showed that you can report on individuals who are assigned training and those who are taking it and not formally assigned it.
A powerful population that you can pull reports on is your new-hire population. What are they searching for in your LMS? What courses are they clicking into that they aren't assigned to?
Speaking of searching, lean on your LMS admin to see if your platform has the functionality to see what keywords learners are using for their searches. This will give you insight into what your audience is naturally curious about. Find out what your learners are trying to learn about so you can provide more informal learning resources for them.
2. Investigate the intranet
One key point about informal learning is that it is a self-directed approach, so let your learners lead the way. Many intranets can pull reports on how many times a document is viewed. Explore what the top 10 or even 50 documents or materials that are viewed on your intranet are, and then see if there is a theme.
Additionally, you can potentially pull information about the days and times people search for information. Is it Tuesday at 10 a.m. that things get downloaded more, or is it Thursday at 2 p.m.? This also gives you valuable information about how your audience consumes information.
Use your intranet information to learn how your learners like to learn. Let's say that your company released a new expense training policy and developed a walk-through video and job aides to accompany it. What is being viewed more often? Would employees rather follow along to a video or download and follow a job aid?
3. Check out the chat
Another low-stakes way of observing informal learning trends is to use chat logs. Scroll through Teams or Slack channels and see what folks are saying. What questions are they asking? How are their colleagues responding? What solutions or points of contact are being offered? For many people, asking a colleague is much easier than putting in a service ticket, and that is informal learning. This information lets you know not only the questions that are being asked but also how people in the organization are solving problems.
Start small
These three methods are small steps to understanding the informal learning environment and its impact on your organization. The assuring thing about informal learning is that you can start small and incorporate more methods later because formal learning is always taking place. Start with one area and begin to explore what you can find out the content your learners want to know more about, how they are learning about things, and how others in the organization are solving problems.
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