1

Understanding and Applying Adult Learning Theory

Most people who work as talent development professionals are transferred into it or are promoted into their jobs. They do not possess formal degrees in employee training, human resource development, human performance improvement, or training and development (T&D). Many are still not certified professionals in learning and performance. And yet awareness of learning—and how to make it better— is fundamental, and essential, to the work of people in the talent development field. By analogy, medicine is based on a fundamental understanding of human anatomy, and talent development is based on a fundamental understanding of human learning. For learning professionals, learning is a critically important means to the end of improving performance.

The same principle applies to managers. Learning is embedded in everything workers do to achieve results on their jobs. While it may not be acknowledged as such, learning has to do with investigating work-related problems, finding solutions, serving customers, and performing daily tasks. Managers play a critically important role in talent development, and learning is crucial in cultivating talented future workers.

This book is intended to be a practical primer on adult learning. It is meant to help talent development professionals improve how effectively they do their jobs in using learning to achieve results (performance). It can also provide managers with useful information on what they should know about adult learning. Learning is at the heart of what people in the talent development field do. It is also at the heart of what most managers must know how to do today if they are to get results from their people, grow talent for the future, and facilitate innovation that leads to competitive advantage.

How Adult Learning Is Defined

Adult learning concerns, unsurprisingly, how adults learn. But the term adult actually has more than one meaning. In one sense, adults may be understood as mentally mature people. In a different sense, the word adult may also be understood to mean those who are beyond the traditional school ages of seven to 21. They are usually employed. Workplace learning is a specialized area within adult learning that focuses on how people learn in workplace settings. The theories and practice of adult learning build on what is known about learning generally. But adult learning is also based on theory and practice arising from the specialized study of adults and what makes them special as a group of learners.

First, two terms need to be contrasted: Training is about instructing. It is summarized in the word tell. Facilitating is about questioning, and getting people to think it out for themselves. It is summarized by the word ask.

Why Knowing How Adults Learn Is Important

Most of who we are as human beings is learned; most of what we can do as human beings is also learned. Unsurprisingly, then, most of what we do in the world of work has something to do with learning. While some people continue to see a sharp divide between the world of formal schooling and the world of work, lifelong education and lifelong learning have become a reality. Half of all human knowledge is outdated in just a few years (Arbesman 2013), and many modern systems are so complicated that no one person understands them completely (Arbesman 2017). Workers are in the same jobs, on average, for only 4.2 years, and 35 percent of all skills they need to do their jobs will change in just three years (Kasriel 2017). Some would say the time has already come when all human knowledge turns over several times while an individual progresses through elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and graduate school.

To discover opportunities and solve problems in today’s fast-paced, dynamic, knowledge-based business world where everything can change suddenly, workers must use their heads and not (as in the agricultural or industrial age) their hands. The information age means that workers are devoting most of their time to acquiring, analyzing, and using information in their daily work. That means they must learn to solve practical work-related problems, often in real time, so they can make split-second decisions. Indeed, they must not only learn but also innovate, finding quick and creative solutions to the problems they encounter.

But how much formal schooling or training has the average manager (or worker) had about learning? Typically, the answer is “very little to none.” Teaching principles of adult learning is not embedded in business school curricula or emphasized in business school classes. Nor is it covered in computer science, engineering, or even human resources. And yet knowing how to coach, mentor, and direct people to achieve results is central to what managers (and workers) do. Finding, developing, and retaining talent is foundational to an organization’s competitive success. And meeting these challenges means that the typical manager must know about adult learning. Learning is also foundational to the success of a worker. But most people have not been given instruction on effective ways to learn.

How Training, Talent Development, and Learning Differ

Training is something done to others. It “pushes” knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are essential to successful work performance. Training changes individuals so that they can get better work results as quickly as possible. It is a short-term, individually-oriented change strategy intended to improve a worker’s job performance.

“Talent development,” write Galagan, Hirt, and Vital (2020), “refers to the efforts that foster learning and employee development to drive organizational performance, productivity, and results.” Talent developers do not “push” knowledge, skills, or attitudes as trainers do; rather, they facilitate the learning process by creating an environment where people want to learn by providing necessary resources to assist in learning and by posing questions to encourage learners to seek their own answers. Talent development is not done for self-improvement alone. Instead, it is the means to the end of improved job and organizational performance.

Learning is something that individuals do on their own. It is a “pull” strategy. Learners pull knowledge, skills, and attitudes from others so that they can be successful. Learning refers to the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. It may also include the acquisition of characteristics that go beyond mere knowledge, skills, and attitudes—such as values, ethics, behaviors, preferences, and much more. Learning occurs across the lifespan, and evidence even exists that learning can occur before birth.

In Cyril Houle’s work, reported in his classic book The Inquiring Mind (1961), he explained the conclusions he drew from interviews with a small sample of just 22 adult learners. He categorized learners into three groups: the goal oriented, the activity oriented, and the learning oriented. In his seminal work, Houle found that some learners embark on learning projects to achieve a goal or solve a problem, some learn to interact socially with others during the learning process, and some learn out of enthusiasm for learning itself. Houle’s work led to interest in self-directed learning, the view that people can (and probably should) take initiative and responsibility for their own learning.

Learning may be as natural for human beings as breathing. Classic research by Allen Tough (1971), a student of Houle’s, revealed that the typical adult undertakes learning projects to solve real-time work or life problems. Tough concluded that “almost everyone undertakes at least one or two major learning efforts a year, and some individuals undertake as many as 15 to 20. The median is eight learning projects a year, involving eight distinct areas of knowledge and skill.” Learners devote eight to 16 hours on each project. Some people exceeded 2,000 hours devoted to learning during a six-month period. Tough discovered that learning projects are usually undertaken to master a specific knowledge or skill in anticipation of a work or life need. Most learning projects were directly related to the learners’ occupations. Tough also found that, in about 75 percent of learning projects, learners assumed most or all responsibility for planning the learning. But these projects are so natural that most people do not even think of them as learning projects, but rather just as part of everyday life.

A simple example may serve to emphasize this point. Suppose an individual wants to save money. Gas prices increase, and the person seeks a less expensive way to get to work than by driving a car. That sounds like a problem from real life. To solve the problem, the individual ponders this question: What are some less expensive ways to get to work? The person may then search for information to solve the problem. She may ask her co-workers, acquaintances, or family members how they solve this problem. She may consult the web for ideas to solve the problem. She may look into public transport, trying to find out how easily accessible it is and how much its cost might compare to the cost of a daily drive to work. This simple example is meant to illustrate how learning and problem solving go together. It is thus an example of what Tough would call a learning project. Note that the person must be motivated to learn and must see a reason for doing so.

The same thing happens on the job—sometimes many times daily. Think about it: A customer calls in with a question. The worker does not know the answer. To help the customer, the worker tries to find the answer to the question and relay it back to the customer. By doing so, the worker is also learning how to field that question from future customers and may even discover that the organization has not done a good job in addressing the issue that the customer is asking about. That is a learning project.

At present, most knowledge workers—780 million of them worldwide (Bersin and Zao-Sanders 2019)—devote much of their time to sitting at a desk in front of a computer for most of their work days. These workers “spend 28 percent of their time on email, 19 percent of their time gathering information (searching for data), and 14 percent of their time communicating internally (in formal and informal meetings). Those three activities combined constitute 61 percent of the total time at work for this vast population” (Bersin and Zao-Sanders 2019). And “finding data, facts, information, and insights, and then sharing it with others, is a daily activity for most of us. In fact, 38 percent of content that’s shared online is either educational or informational” (Bersin and Zao-Sanders 2019). In short, much of the time spent in the workday has to do with finding, analyzing, and communicating information. It is thus closely related to learning, if not learning-focused in its own right.

How Learning Can Influence Organizational and Individual Success

If learning is about mastering and applying useful knowledge, skills, and attitudes to achieve results, then it is central to organizational and individual success. Neither organizations nor individuals can adapt to change—or take full advantage of future opportunities—if they lack the requisite knowledge, skills, and attitudes. As a result, learning is a very important means to the end of performing.

In recent years, much attention has been focused on demonstrating the business impact or the return-on-investment of training. But less attention has been focused on demonstrating the business impact or return-on-investment of learning. One reason may be that measuring the value of learning may be even more daunting than measuring the value of training. Participation in training can be identified. It is easy to count how many people are sitting in training seats, are logged into online training, or are participating in planned apprenticeships. And if the training is planned, it is easy to see what people have been taught to do by consulting the measurable instructional objectives. However, it remains to be seen whether they apply what they have been taught back on the job and what measurable value the organization gains when they do that. It is even more challenging to measure the value and impact of so-called far transfer of learning by which individuals creatively adapt what they have learned to new situations that were not similar to those in the learning situation.

Learning is thus not always planned or obvious. Much learning is informal. The fruits of organizational learning are embedded in taken-for-granted aspects of corporate culture. Culture has to do with the unspoken assumptions about the right and wrong ways to do things (Schein 2016). Where did those assumptions come from? The answer is usually “from experience,” and that experience is registered in the memories of individuals and in the relics of organizational life (such as policies and procedures). Experience is valued because it is the result of learning. While the value of learning from experience seems obvious, it is more difficult to measure. Whose experience is important? How is experience applied? What do people do with it, and how do they creatively apply what has been learned from experience to new situations?

While measurement difficulties may be apparent in noting the impact of learning on performance, it is clear that individuals—and organizations—usually become more efficient and effective as they gain experience. It is the learning that stems from experience that makes them more efficient and effective. There seems to be little doubt that learning can and does have an impact on organizational and individual performance.

Linking Talent Development to Organizational Strategy

A perennial complaint of chief executive officers is that talent development initiatives are not clearly or effectively tied to the organization’s business needs or strategic initiatives. But the reality is that linking talent development to organizational strategy is a matter of taking the steps to do it and then communicating it.

There are many ways to link talent development to strategy. Some have been described at great length (Rothwell and Kazanas 2003). Other ways have emerged more recently.

The first of those recently emergent ways is to make sure that, in addition to instructional or performance objectives stated for every planned learning experience, the link between talent development and organizational strategy is clarified. In fact, it should be made bluntly explicit. Just as most talent developers state the objectives at the opening of a learning experience, they can—and should—also state how the learning experience aligns with business strategy. They should spell out how participating in a learning program will help the organization achieve strategic goals.

A second way is to link talent development efforts to the organization’s measurable balanced scorecard strategic goals and, in turn, link talent development efforts to the key performance indicators (KPIs) of divisions, departments, teams, work groups, and individuals. Talent development should, of course, be a means to the end of improving performance. For that reason it should be possible to link it to KPIs and, in turn, to the organization’s strategic goals as expressed in the measurable targets of the balanced scorecard.

A third way is build an organizational talent development effort specifically and expressly tied to strategic goals. Some call that “building a talent development structure.” That can be done using a game-based approach that will involve talent developers and senior leaders in creating a strategy for talent development that is explicitly linked to the organization’s needs (see Rothwell, Stopper, and Zaballero 2015a).

Some other ways include (Rothwell and Kazanas 2003):

• The career approach: As individuals develop written individual development plans to guide their personal and professional development, they also describe how their career interests link up to and align with organizational strategic goals. If they do not know how that link is made, they discuss it with their immediate supervisors. Some people call this approach the “bottom-up approach” to distinguish it from the method described in the preceding paragraph, sometimes called a “top-down approach.”

• The scenario-based approach: As top managers conduct strategic planning using scenario analysis to clarify how the organization will deal over time with favorable, unfavorable, and realistic competitive conditions, talent development scenarios are devised to fit with each possible future scenario.

• The simulation approach: Talent developers devise a simulation in which learners are placed in an environment that is meant to be similar to what is expected in the future. As one example, a retail chain built a “store of the future” that was meant to represent what a store in the chain would be like five or 10 years out (at the end of the strategic planning horizon). By dramatically showing learners what technology and customers of the future might be like, learners are confronted with new challenges that they must learn to address.

• The rifle approach: Talent developers pick just one organizational strategic goal and plan many learning experiences to equip workers with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and other characteristics that may be needed to meet that strategic goal. Often the goal is linked to addressing a complaint that managers or external observers may have about the organization. As one example: One organization’s leaders kept hearing that their workers did not know how to answer customer questions about the company’s products compared to those of competitors. The talent developers created a learning program in which workers were briefed on the products offered by competitors so that they were well-equipped to answer customer questions.

The Role of Chief Learning Officer

The chief learning officer (CLO), sometimes called the chief talent development officer (CTDO) or chief talent officer (CTO), is a senior executive charged with facilitating the integration of an organization’s talent development efforts with the organization’s business needs and measurable strategic goals (Caplan 2013; Elkeles and Phillips 2007). CLOs usually report directly to the chief executive officer (CEO) and may report periodically (in a public company) to the organization’s board of directors or (in a private company) to the organization’s owners. They play key roles in ensuring that workplace learning is well-managed in an organizational setting, fits its corporate culture, and helps to create new corporate cultures best aligned with the competitive issues facing the organization. CLOs help to align learning efforts to business strategy.

CLOs must be able to demonstrate leadership and apply general management skills, learning-related concepts and theories, and strategic thinking skills (Hassell 2016). Often they must be able to guide the organization’s leaders and stakeholders through a process by which to establish the framework in the organization to support learning (see Rothwell, Stopper, and Zaballero 2015a and 2015b). That activity could involve creating a robust list of potential activities that the talent development function could focus on. (Examples might include leadership development, training design, assessing learning needs, or designing learning experiences.) They then ask the organization’s leaders to select which activities the talent development function should focus on, how those efforts might best help the organization achieve its strategic business needs, and even how much time, money, and staff to devote such efforts.

Getting It Done

Chapter 1 emphasized the importance of learning on performance and how learning is embedded in the work experience. Here are some questions to help you develop a mindset for the application of the principles you will learn in the succeeding chapters.

Consider how learning influences your daily work. Can you list some ways this influence is manifested?

1.

2.

How might you measure learning’s impact on your own performance?

1.

2.

How might your learning affect the performance of your organization?

1.

2.