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Tim Boileau
In today’s digitally connected world we are constantly acquiring new personal knowledge and skills, discovering new methods of work and ways to earn a living, solving problems, and changing the way we create, access and share information, through informal learning. The topic of informal learning can be discussed in many different contexts and from a variety of theoretical perspectives. For the purposes of this chapter, informal learning is examined through the lens of lifelong learning and performance, primarily as it relates to adult learners. Jay Cross (2007) may be credited for popularizing the term “informal learning”, although he claimed to have first heard it from Peter Henschel sometime during the mid-1990s, who at the time was director of the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL), when he said:
People are learning all the time, in varied settings and often most effectively in the context of work itself. ‘Training’—formal learning of all kinds—channels some important learning but doesn’t carry the heaviest load. The workhorse of the knowledge economy has been, and continues to be, informal learning. (Cross, 2007, p. xiii)
Indeed, the concept of informal learning has been around for many years preceding the peak of the industrial revolution during the 19th century in the form of guild support for traditional apprenticeships, and is ubiquitous in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century in the form of cognitive apprenticeship (Collins & Kapur, 2014).
From a performance perspective, informal learning occurs through self-initiated activity undertaken by people in a work setting, resulting in the creation of new skills and knowledge, in the completion of a job or task (Boileau, 2011). In other words, informal learning is situated in meaningful experiences that are built on top of prior experiences and pre-existing knowledge constructs, thereby facilitating the development of new tacit and explicit knowledge. This is different from formal learning where the emphasis is on transfer of explicit knowledge from instructor to learner, typically associated with a separation of time and space between the formal learning event and application of the knowledge or skill. In this scenario, additional performance support is often needed in order to close the gap between existing knowledge and skills, and expected performance. According to Boileau (2011, p. 13), “Humans learn when they perceive a need to know, and evidence of learning is in their ability to do something they could not do before.”
In this chapter, I explore the nuances of informal learning to better understand its unique role in lifelong learning and performance. The remainder of this chapter is organized in the following sections:
- Definition of Informal vs. Formal Learning
- Informal Learning Trends and Issues
- Informal Learning and Culture
Definition of Informal vs. Formal Learning
A review of the literature on the definition of informal vs. formal learning shows