Learning is more than just doing the job

Often the problem with just ‘doing a job’ is that the majority of work tasks that people face are not tough enough to accelerate their learning.

We often think about the 70:20:10 model as focusing on the 70, the on-the-job learning. It is interesting to note that the original research actually talks about the 70 as being ‘tough jobs’, those tasks that stretch learners beyond their current capacity.

We recently had a client who wanted to decrease the time it took for new starters to become competent at their job, which involves making complex decisions multiple times a day. The core learning method for the current program is on-the-job learning; new trainees begin doing part of their job role within days of starting. The problem is that most of the day-to-day work is straightforward and they were not being exposed to the unusual or different tasks that they need to experience to become competent. They were not doing the ‘tough jobs’. Also, doing real work that was subsequently being offered to clients meant that the trainees felt a lot of pressure. The process wasn't conducive to allowing them to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes.

Medical education has a sophisticated model for on-the-job learning that other disciplines can learn from. One part of the model is that trainee doctors begin working in hospitals, where all the complex patient cases end up, at a relatively early stage of their training. The trainee doctors might not be making decisions but they are observing how those decisions are being made on what are often extremely complex issues. They are being exposed to extremes and even diseases that they might not see for the whole of their career. If they went straight into a general practice role then they would be exposed only to more-standard cases and would have never seen these extremes. The result would be a reduced ability to diagnose and make decisions about problems that are outside of the normal.

The new learning design for our client involved adopting a similar approach, accelerating the onboarding process to expose trainees to ‘extremes’ early in the learning process. The design reduces the amount of real work that happens early in the program. Instead, the learner works on simulations of real tasks designed to be ‘tough jobs’, much like those the hospital provides for trainee doctors. The simulations allow the learners to make mistakes, reflect and try again without the pressure of their errors being seen by the client.