Performance Management: Putting Research into Action

Incidence of Informal Training

While intuitively it would appear self-evident that the majority of learning that a worker experiences is informal, few studies have attempted to measure it. One challenge to measuring the amount of informal learning that occurs in the workplace is the difficulty in defining it. Nevertheless, researchers who do attempt to study it estimate that between 75 and 96 percent of all learning in organizations occurs informally. But estimates vary widely. In a BLS report (Loewenstein & Spletzer, 1994), the results from the Current Population Survey indicated that 44 percent of workers receive formal training and 16 percent reported “yes” when asked if they had participated in informal training. In the same report, the ...