POWERING WORKPLACE PERFORMANCE

24 FEBRUARY, 2015

70:20:10 - ABOVE ALL ELSE IT'S A CHANGE AGENT

by Charles Jennings

“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

George Bernard Shaw

Tom Spiglanin is a senior engineering specialist at the Aerospace Corporation in California and is a leader in the organisation’s technical training department. The people he works with carry out research for the US space programmes – both for the US Government and for civil agencies like NASA and NOAA. In other words, they’re rocket scientists. Tom is a rocket scientist and helps other helps rocket scientists learn their stuff.

Recently Tom wrote a series of blogs titled ‘Ten Things I Believe About Workplace Learning’. His list included important issues and current areas of focus such as the new and emerging roles for L&D professionals; the value of sharing as a skill for learning and development; the importance of personal learning networks and personal knowledge mastery; and the inverse relationship between experience and the value of formal learning.

The first post on Tom’s list was I Believe in the 70:20:10 framework.

The messages he conveyed in this short post struck me as having been missed by lots of people when they talk about the 70:20:10 model as a framework for learning and development.

Tom wrote:

“The reason this framework works is that it more or less reflects what’s actually true for employees in the typical workplace. Formal education has its place in preparing people for the workplace. Once those people become employees, they have a job to get done. People aren’t hired to learn, they’re hired to increase productivity or capability. There are productivity expectations and organizational needs to be met.”

It’s Not the Numbers

It “more or less reflects what’s actually true for employees in a typical workplace”. That’s the key to the 70:20:10 model, and there’s an increasing body of data in support of this.

We all know instinctively that we learn most of what we need through observing, mimicking, discussing, trying things out, making mistakes, and trying again until we are adept. That’s the nature of human learning. We are learning animals, born to learn.

We learn through watching others who ‘know how to do’ (who of us hasn’t stood and looked over someone’s shoulder recently to see how they were operating a ticket machine or some other piece of technology?) and through conversations. We learn through navigating tough situations, and through practice. And we learn through taking time to reflect on challenges and how we might have handled them differently so we can do better next time (again, who of us hasn’t spent time recently mulling over a difficult work problem whilst lying in bed, showering, or out walking the dog, and then planned ways to address it ?)

Double-Edged Sword

To make it easier to explain the skew favouring informal and workplace learning over formal (in terms of contribution to performance) we put a number on each of the three broad categories in the 70:20:10 model – [the ‘70’] learning through by experience and practice; [the ‘20’] learning through, and with, others; and [the ‘10’] learning through courses, programmes and content structured by others.

However, the way these three broad categories are described in the model can lead to a focus on the ratios rather than the underlying principles and categorisation. As such ‘the numbers’ can serve as a double-edged sword.

Click here to read the full article on Charles Jennings blog.

Charles Jennings will be presenting at a workshop at DeakinCo. on Friday, 6 March. Register your interest.