Mastering the Art of Adult Learning: 6 Key Principles for Success
In today’s fast-paced business environment, effective organizational training programs are not just vital to improving employee perceptions and retaining top talent but also critical to ensuring you can develop a continual leadership pipeline and quickly retrain and divert employees into new roles needed to execute rapidly changing organizational strategies. For organizations aiming to tackle such challenges, understanding how adults learn is a crucial first step.
Today, adult learning principles are more important than ever due to shorter attention spans, the need for personalized and practical learning, and the demands of a rapidly changing workplace. Recent research indicates that adult attention spans are declining, likely due to the pervasive use of digital technology and the constant influx of information. A study by Dr. Gloria Mark found that the average time individuals focus on a single screen before switching has decreased from about 2.5 minutes to 47 seconds over the past two decades. Additionally, a survey revealed that the typical British adult’s attention span is approximately 17 minutes and 10 seconds, with younger adults (18-24) often losing focus in under a minute.
These findings suggest that the modern digital environment significantly impacts our ability to maintain prolonged attention. Just as our attention spans have changed, so should our learning modalities. By focusing on relevance, engagement, and self-directed methods, these principles ensure adults can efficiently upskill and apply knowledge in today’s fast-paced, information-overloaded world.
Learning and Development Professionals, HR Leaders, and CXOs must leverage key adult learning principles to ensure that learning initiatives resonate with employees and drive organizational success. In this article, we explore 6 fundamental principles and offer insights into identifying them in action so you can either implement them into your own learning programs or know what to look for when choosing an external provider. We’ll also share how Monark incorporates these principles into our methodology.
The Importance of Understanding the ‘Why’
Adult learners want to understand the purpose behind their learning. When employees can comprehend the ‘why,’ they are more likely to engage deeply with the content. For leaders, one way to connect to the why, is to start with a 360-degree assessment. This grounds their learning in their current baseline and performance. For organizations, administrators should ensure that learning objectives are clearly communicated and aligned with both personal and professional goals.
At Monark, we accomplish this in our programs by investing time into our needs analysis, collaborating with organizational leaders to ensure the courses align with both their long-term organizational goals and the specific skillsets needed by the employees enrolled. Internally, this can also be promoted through thoughtful and thorough communication strategies in which the importance of and decision to tackle specific learning objectives is shared with employees through multiple channels (such as top management announcing it in the quarterly townhall and direct supervisors discussing it in their regular 1:1s).
Autonomy and Self-Directed Learning
Adult learners prefer when they have control over their learning journey. Self-directed learning has also been found to be pivotal to developing a learning organization (i.e., an organization that continuously learns and is better prepared to tackle change). Having such independence from an employee’s point of view can look like setting their own learning objectives, selecting the methods and resources for their learning, and conducting self-assessments of their progress.
Strategies such as providing flexible learning paths and encouraging self-directed projects allow employees to tailor their learning experiences to their needs and interests. Monark’s platform allows employees to tackle training when they have the time to (with courses broken down into micro-learning chunks) and in whichever way best suits their learning style (mobile app or desktop-based).
Integrating Personal Experiences
Adults bring valuable experiences to the learning environment, which can enrich the educational process. Allowing employees to integrate their personal experiences into organizational learning creates a more relatable and impactful experience. Encouraging reflection and sharing enables learners to connect new knowledge with existing experiences, facilitating deeper understanding and retention.
There are many ways organizations can leverage the diverse backgrounds of their workforce to create a collaborative and dynamic learning environment. Creating learning boards or channels on a company’s intranet or Slack is one way to foster communication around current learnings and understanding of how they are being implemented and perceived by employees across the organization. Facilitation sessions, utilized at Monark, are also a great way to get employees to discuss their training as a group, with seasoned facilitators helping bridge knowledge gaps and ensure conversations hold ample space for varied viewpoints and ideas, ensuring employees can learn not just from the content and their personal experiences with it but from their peers as well.
Linking Learning to Timely Tasks
Adults are motivated by learning that is immediately applicable to their roles and responsibilities. That is, their readiness to learn is often triggered by real-world tasks or challenges, making situational learning particularly effective. Thus, designing learning programs that clearly connect to specific, timely tasks or organizational challenges enhances their relevance and urgency.
By providing practical applications, leaders can ensure that learning initiatives are not only theoretical but also actionable. This can be done in a myriad of ways, from selecting project-based learning to incorporating timely reminders (such as notifying individuals they have access to a feedback course the week before performance reviews are completed). Monark itself embeds small goals throughout our courses, allowing individuals to set their own deadlines and reminders to ensure the practice of learned behaviors not only occurs but does so on a schedule that makes sense for learners. Additionally, Monark doesn’t mean the learning stops when a course does. Instead, we focus on performance optimization by providing bite-sized, just-in-time tips throughout our tools, like our 1:1 tool, which reminds individuals of best practices just as they’re about to start a call with a direct report.
Life-Centered Learning for Problem-Solving and Goal Achievement
Adults tend to favor when learning focuses on real-world problem-solving and goal achievement. Organizations can create learning experiences that address real-life challenges and support employees in achieving their professional and personal goals.
Incorporating roleplays or simulations based on challenges individuals will face in their roles along with concrete feedback to allow individuals to develop their skills can be one approach to incorporating easily identifiable applicable learnings to your program, encouraging individuals to engage with your material. Monark also includes pre- and post- mini-360s with all its courses, identifying room for improvement, encouraging individuals to focus in on those areas throughout the coursework, and following up with re-assessment afterwards to provide opportunities for personal satisfaction and goal achievement.
Intrinsic Motivation in Adult Learning
Intrinsic motivation plays a significant role in adult learning. Organizations can tap into employees’ internal motivations by aligning learning with personal interests and values. Deloitte suggests that larger shifts in culture can encourage individuals to take on an ‘explorer’s mindset’ and increase their desire to act as lifelong learners. By fostering intrinsic motivation, organizations can create a more fulfilling and sustainable learning experience that drives employee satisfaction and retention, ultimately benefiting the organization as a whole.
Since what tends to motivate individuals can vary, making time to have conscious conversations about each individual’s personal goals and aspirations is critical. To do so ensure that the leaders of employees receiving training have themselves been trained on having such conversations and motivating and engaging their own teams, to ensure they can provide critical support to employees who are engaged in learning. At Monark, our research and product teams prioritize identifying intrinsic motivation by conducting studies to understand what drives employees to consistently engage with learning (and continually adapt our offering to suit learners needs)—an approach you can adopt as well.
By understanding and applying these key principles of adult learning, you can select and implement effective learning programs that resonate with employees and drive organizational success. Emphasizing the ‘why,’ fostering autonomy, integrating personal experiences, linking learning to tasks, focusing on problem-solving, and nurturing intrinsic motivation are all essential strategies for unlocking the full potential of organizational education. By identifying just one strategy shared here and giving it a go you can explore how these principles can transform your approach to learning and development and enhance your organization’s educational outcomes.
Looking to make a big impact more quickly? Reach out to learn more about how Monark could help.
