Many organisations have gone all 70/20/10 on professional training and development. This seems to have given Finance an excuse to cut budgets to only 10% of what they were. Dumb move. Here’s why.
The theory of 70/20/10 is that 70% of your learning comes from experience, 20% from others (shadowing, mentoring, story-telling for example) and 10% from the classroom. What L&D and organisational development professionals know is that getting that 70 and 20 also costs. Good experience doesn’t just happen – people take time to learn and adopt new ideas. Great mentoring takes time. That costs money.
And just shadowing someone by itself doesn’t mean people learn. The learning is in the debrief after the meeting to point out what the learner didn’t see – either in the real world or in the head of the mentor. Deep Smarts from Harvard Business Review looks at this 20% – the passing on of learning through others. As baby boomers retire and take their deep smarts, their IP, with them, we’re in desperate need of great ways to leverage what they know before they go on to do things we don’t pay them to.
Worth a read.
