Meet the modern learner

The way we work has radically changed. We spend an enormous amount of time looking for information at work and we are constantly distracted by messages, emails, phone calls etc. As a result, in a given week, employees take less than 25 minutes of time to actually slow down and make time to learn.

Reality of learning today

‍The modern learner spends only 1% of a work week on learning. This is 24 minutes. How do they spend these 24 minutes?
By on-demand learning outside of traditional training and development channels. For example, via search engines they do a quick search for what they need for their job. Free online courses are very popular. And more and more they are using their smartphones to quickly get a solution for a problem or question they NOW have.
Secondly, collaborative learning still plays a major role. Still 80% of the learning happens on the job via peers, direct colleagues and managers. By asking other people or sharing what they know interactions with peers, teammates and managers takes place. And Google plays here a major role: free-on demand courses are very popular. The communities around these courses create a strong bond among learners.
And thirdly: outside their job. More and more people are looking for options on their own, because they aren’t getting what they need from their employers. Of which IT professionals are the biggest group who learn outside and pay themselves for their development.

I need help now

‍When you ask people about WHEN they want to learn, the majority of them answer that they want to learn NOW, on the spot. This is what we call nowadays “micro-learning,” things we can quickly read, view, or consume and they only take 10 minutes or less. These may be a video, a blog, or a set of instructional questions that help us think differently than we did before. We consume this kind of material all day, and most of the news sites and social networks now offer such learning in a massive, curated stream.
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How does this all resonate for you? When you look at your people, what do they do? When designing your learning programs think about the 24 minutes and the 10 minutes or less time needed to explain or explore a topic. Think about yourself, when you want to know something, where do you go to?

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Lara van der Steen
lara@parcourslearning.com

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Source: Josh Bersin, the disruption of digital learning: ten things we have learned