I cam across a post of yours on the Saba users forum asking if anyone has moved from the On Premise model to a hosted model with their Saba LMS. I was wondering why you had that thought. We are currently on a On Premise model and things have not been going too well.

Please do let me know when you get a chance.

Thanks and Regards
Shivkumar Lund

If I look at my own career and the learning I’ve done so far, it’s easy for me to see that most of what I have learned, I have NOT learned informally. I have learned IN SCHOOL (or in books), and I have practiced at work. Of course, practice is an important part of anyone’s life, but practice doesn’t necessarily equal learning. Practice gives you experience in what you’ve already learned, but doesn’t necessarily lead to new learning; and if it does, it will be the exception rather than the norm. Of course I value experience, but again experience does not equal learning. So maybe we should define or redefine what learning actually means.

There are instances where you actually do learn informally; this may happen as a result of a major change in your organization or when you go out of your comfort zone and try something you have never tried before. But this will likely happen at discrete moments in your life, not continuously. So I’m not sure why so much emphasis is put on informal learning, as if it were a panacea.

I know for a fact that I have learned more in the four years I spent in college – both formally and informally – than in the ensuing 12 years, working a ‘regular’ job. And of course this makes perfect sense because the purpose of going to school is to LEARN in the first place. I’m not sure where this idea, that informal learning is somehow better or more effeicient than formal learning, actually comes from.

I have a feeling that this model has become popular among managements everywhere, because business organizations have always been reluctant to spend much money on general training for their employees. They do not always see a tangible return on investment (and who can blame them?). So this 70-20-10 model gives executives the ‘intellectual excuse’ they need to keep under-investing in their employees’ education. Again, this is pure intuition, nothing scientific.

The average employee spend about 5 days per annum in the classroom (I am guessing) and about 300 on the job.

As Alan Todd commented: it makes intuitive sense.

Personally I did not look for research – saw it as a variation of the Pareto Principle.

It makes commercial sense to structure the social/ experiential interactions in an organisation (to the extent that it is practicable) to be optimized for learning.

Organisations will be crippled if they can only move forward when every decision has to be based on a peer-review study.

Sometimes the Hawthorne Effect will just kick in and it does not matter if the strategy is right, just ‘doing’ something will have a positive effect..