E
eLeaP Editorial Team
Guest
- Thread Author
- #1
Think about the last time you learned something useful at work, and chances are it did not happen in a course. A colleague showed you a shortcut, or you fixed a problem and remembered the fix for next time.
That is informal learning, and it fills a large part of every working week even though few organizations plan for it. Most companies spend their training budgets on the visible side, scheduling courses and tracking completions while the quiet exchanges where employees learn how the job really works go unrecorded. The OECD’s June 2026 report, Giving Informal Learning the Recognition It Deserves, calls informal learning a major but underrecognized part of lifelong learning.
A learning management system (LMS) can close part of that gap. It cannot capture every hallway conversation, but it can store the best answers, make them easy to find, and connect everyday learning to structured development. This guide covers the definition, workplace examples, benefits, challenges, an implementation plan, measurement methods, and LMS capabilities.
Informal learning is knowledge or skill gained through everyday experience, interaction, and self-directed activity outside structured educational programs. Nobody assigns it, and nobody grades it, and the learner usually acts because a real problem needs solving.
Two types matter in practice:
The OECD’s 2026 report describes informal learning as flexible and continuous, and it warns that the concept remains poorly defined and inconsistently measured. For HR teams, that gap explains why so much workplace learning goes unrecorded.
Peer-reviewed research supports the same point. A 2018 meta-analysis in the Journal of Business and Psychology by Cerasoli and colleagues examined what drives informal learning behaviors and what those behaviors produce. The authors caution that most underlying studies were cross-sectional, so the findings do not prove that informal learning causes better performance.
Other learning types help frame the idea. Formal learning follows a curriculum and often ends with an assessment or certificate. Non-formal learning sits in between, such as a short vendor workshop that has a facilitator and a plan but carries no formal accreditation. Informal learning has none of that scaffolding.
Why does this matter for employee development? Roles change faster than course catalogs, and informal learning lets employees keep pace between formal programs, so skills keep growing every week instead of every quarter.
Experience remains the oldest teacher. An employee completes a task, hits a snag, solves it, and thinks about what happened, and that reflection turns activity into skill. A support agent who handles a messy client request often learns more from it than any slide deck could teach.
Colleagues teach each other constantly. A senior technician demonstrates a repair, and a teammate shares a fix in a chat thread. Experienced employees also explain the unwritten rules, such as how approvals really move or which customers need extra care, so new team members absorb workplace practices faster when someone walks them through the work.
Employees also search, ask, and join. They watch tutorials, follow professional communities, and read discussion threads. A 2025 qualitative meta-synthesis in the Journal of Workplace Learning, “What Is Informal Workplace Learning,” reviewed 17 sources and identified eight main components. These include action or experience, critical reflection, collective learning, and self-directed learning.
One distinction avoids confusion. Self-directed learning describes who steers the process, while informal learning describes the setting and structure. A self-directed learner can enroll in a formal course, and an informal conversation can happen with no plan at all.
Six everyday situations show how informal learning works:
None of these examples needed a course, and each one built practical knowledge at the moment the employee needed it. The real opportunity sits in what happens next, because most of these lessons vanish when the conversation ends and the knowledge leaves with a skilled colleague.
Smart teams capture the best lessons. A two-minute video, a one-page checklist, or a short write-up after a project can preserve them, and once a reviewer approves the material and the team stores it centrally, a private lesson becomes a shared resource.
Employees seek answers when questions arise instead of waiting for the next scheduled session. Shared experiences also help teams solve recurring problems, because someone has usually seen the issue before.
Practical knowledge moves across teams when people talk and document. Written lessons reduce dependence on any single expert, and documentation protects the organization when people change roles or leave.
Everyday tasks create chances to build new skills. Informal learning complements formal training and professional development plans instead of replacing them, so together they cover both quick questions and structured growth.
Employees choose resources that fit their own questions. Supportive managers can strengthen this habit by asking what someone learned, not only what someone finished, and curiosity grows when leaders reward it.
The Association for Talent Development (ATD) published a 2024 report called Informal Learning: Measuring Success Outside the Classroom. The survey drew on 297 talent development professionals. At 33 percent of organizations, informal learning made up more than half of all learning, yet only 35 percent measured its effectiveness. Meanwhile, 51 percent of respondents expected their use of informal learning to grow over the next two years, and organizations offered an average of five informal learning opportunities.
Those figures describe what practitioners reported, not proven results. The survey does not show that informal learning automatically improves productivity or retention, so treat it as a snapshot of current practice.
The two approaches complement each other. Compliance courses, safety certifications, and regulated procedures need structure and proof of completion, while quick situational questions need fast answers from people who know the work.
Two clarifications prevent common mistakes. An informal activity can still be organized on purpose, as with a voluntary mentoring program. Using digital technology also does not make learning formal, because a chat channel full of tips remains informal even when software hosts it.
Teams tend to keep useful knowledge close. Without an accessible place to store practical guidance, the same questions repeat in every department, and good ideas stay trapped in one group.
Colleagues sometimes pass along outdated or wrong practices, and a habit that worked three years ago may now break a policy. Organizations need a clear review step for critical information, such as safety or compliance guidance, before anyone publishes it.
Heavy workloads squeeze out reflection, and employees skip the five-minute debrief because the next deadline is waiting. Managers have to protect that time on purpose.
Research on leadership points in the same way. A 2026 systematic review in The Learning Organization by Vuorio and colleagues followed PRISMA 2020 guidelines and examined how individual, organizational, and leadership factors affect informal learning in knowledge work. The authors found that transformational and enabling leadership styles help, and that self-efficacy strengthens the effect.
A 2025 study by the same research group found that managers and employees both value informal learning but disagree about how visible it is and how well the organization supports it. The authors describe “symbolic autonomy,” where companies praise learning in words but provide no real mechanisms behind it.
Conversations and observations rarely generate records, and resource views or participation counts show activity, not skill. A video with 500 views may have taught nothing. The ATD finding that only 35 percent of surveyed organizations measured effectiveness fits this problem, and a measurement plan beats guessing.
Use this six-step framework to turn scattered habits into a working practice:
These practices work best when managers back them, and employees can trust the information they find. Without both, even a well-built library gathers dust.
An LMS works best as the backbone of the program, not the whole body. It organizes what people learn and share, then links that knowledge to structured development. Capabilities vary by platform, so check a vendor’s feature list before you plan around any tool.
A searchable library holds guides, videos, reference documents, and job aids in one place, so employees find answers in seconds instead of pinging three colleagues. eLeaP’s learning management system, for example, lets teams manage training materials and programs on a single platform.
Some platforms add discussion boards, collaborative tools, or user-generated content. Where available, these features let employees post a tip, attach a video, and answer each other, and shared resources then reach far more people than a single hallway chat.
Assessments reveal skill gaps and check practical understanding, and role-based recommendations can point employees to the next useful resource where the platform supports them. A system with skills and competencies tracking, observation assessments, and on-the-job training can verify what employees actually do, which a quiz alone cannot.
Learning paths then bundle informal resources with required courses, so an employee who reads a job aid today can follow a path toward a formal assessment tomorrow.
Resource views, participation, and assessment results each reveal something different. Views show what people open, participation shows who contributes, and assessments show whether people can apply the knowledge.
No LMS captures every informal moment, and activity data alone cannot prove learning impact. Use tracking reports to spot patterns, then confirm them with managers and employees.
Regulated teams gain one more benefit. Under the eLeaP umbrella, the QMS and LMS work together, so quality events such as CAPAs and deviations can trigger training updates and a hard-won lesson reaches every affected employee.
You do not need to track every conversation. Instead, collect evidence from several angles:
A simple five-step process keeps the work focused:
Cedefop’s European guidelines describe four phases for validating non-formal and informal learning: identification, documentation, assessment, and certification. That framework helps organizations recognize what employees already know, but it is not a universal formula for measuring workplace performance, so do not treat it as one.
Informal learning means picking up skills through everyday experience instead of a planned course. For example, a customer service rep learns a better refund script by listening to a veteran’s calls.
Neither approach wins outright. Formal training suits compliance, certification, and skills that need assessment, while informal learning suits quick situational questions. Most organizations get the best results by combining both.
Yes, depending on the platform. Searchable resource libraries, collaboration features, and learning analytics can all help, so confirm which features your vendor actually offers before you decide.
Combine employee feedback, demonstrated skills, knowledge-sharing activity, and relevant performance indicators. No single number tells the whole story, so look for patterns across several sources.
Non-formal learning is organized learning outside the formal education system, such as a short workshop. Informal learning commonly emerges from everyday activities and experiences with no set curriculum.
Informal learning shapes how employees gain practical knowledge every day. Supportive managers, reliable information, and room to share knowledge turn that habit into a strength, and clear ways to recognize skill growth finish the job.
An LMS can organize resources and connect employees with useful learning opportunities, and platforms like eLeaP’s LMS and QMS suite also link everyday lessons to structured training and compliance records. Start small: find where your employees already learn from one another, then make that knowledge easier to access, share, and apply.
That is informal learning, and it fills a large part of every working week even though few organizations plan for it. Most companies spend their training budgets on the visible side, scheduling courses and tracking completions while the quiet exchanges where employees learn how the job really works go unrecorded. The OECD’s June 2026 report, Giving Informal Learning the Recognition It Deserves, calls informal learning a major but underrecognized part of lifelong learning.
A learning management system (LMS) can close part of that gap. It cannot capture every hallway conversation, but it can store the best answers, make them easy to find, and connect everyday learning to structured development. This guide covers the definition, workplace examples, benefits, challenges, an implementation plan, measurement methods, and LMS capabilities.
What Is Informal Learning?
Informal learning is knowledge or skill gained through everyday experience, interaction, and self-directed activity outside structured educational programs. Nobody assigns it, and nobody grades it, and the learner usually acts because a real problem needs solving.
Two types matter in practice:
- Intentional learning happens when an employee asks a colleague for guidance or searches for a how-to video.
- Incidental learning happens when someone discovers a better method while finishing a task.
The OECD’s 2026 report describes informal learning as flexible and continuous, and it warns that the concept remains poorly defined and inconsistently measured. For HR teams, that gap explains why so much workplace learning goes unrecorded.
Peer-reviewed research supports the same point. A 2018 meta-analysis in the Journal of Business and Psychology by Cerasoli and colleagues examined what drives informal learning behaviors and what those behaviors produce. The authors caution that most underlying studies were cross-sectional, so the findings do not prove that informal learning causes better performance.
Other learning types help frame the idea. Formal learning follows a curriculum and often ends with an assessment or certificate. Non-formal learning sits in between, such as a short vendor workshop that has a facilitator and a plan but carries no formal accreditation. Informal learning has none of that scaffolding.
Why does this matter for employee development? Roles change faster than course catalogs, and informal learning lets employees keep pace between formal programs, so skills keep growing every week instead of every quarter.
What Are the Main Types of Informal Learning?
Learning Through Workplace Experience
Experience remains the oldest teacher. An employee completes a task, hits a snag, solves it, and thinks about what happened, and that reflection turns activity into skill. A support agent who handles a messy client request often learns more from it than any slide deck could teach.
Peer-to-Peer Learning and Knowledge Sharing
Colleagues teach each other constantly. A senior technician demonstrates a repair, and a teammate shares a fix in a chat thread. Experienced employees also explain the unwritten rules, such as how approvals really move or which customers need extra care, so new team members absorb workplace practices faster when someone walks them through the work.
Self-Directed and Social Learning
Employees also search, ask, and join. They watch tutorials, follow professional communities, and read discussion threads. A 2025 qualitative meta-synthesis in the Journal of Workplace Learning, “What Is Informal Workplace Learning,” reviewed 17 sources and identified eight main components. These include action or experience, critical reflection, collective learning, and self-directed learning.
One distinction avoids confusion. Self-directed learning describes who steers the process, while informal learning describes the setting and structure. A self-directed learner can enroll in a formal course, and an informal conversation can happen with no plan at all.
What Are Examples of Informal Learning in the Workplace?
Six everyday situations show how informal learning works:
- A technician learns a troubleshooting technique from an experienced colleague.
- A team shares a short video that demonstrates a faster workflow.
- A manager leads a lessons-learned discussion after a finished project.
- Remote employees swap fixes through workplace communication tools.
- A new hire shadows a veteran who handles a tricky customer issue.
- An employee opens a job aid to complete an unfamiliar task.
None of these examples needed a course, and each one built practical knowledge at the moment the employee needed it. The real opportunity sits in what happens next, because most of these lessons vanish when the conversation ends and the knowledge leaves with a skilled colleague.
Smart teams capture the best lessons. A two-minute video, a one-page checklist, or a short write-up after a project can preserve them, and once a reviewer approves the material and the team stores it centrally, a private lesson becomes a shared resource.
What Are the Benefits of Informal Learning?
Faster Access to Practical Knowledge
Employees seek answers when questions arise instead of waiting for the next scheduled session. Shared experiences also help teams solve recurring problems, because someone has usually seen the issue before.
Better Knowledge Sharing and Retention
Practical knowledge moves across teams when people talk and document. Written lessons reduce dependence on any single expert, and documentation protects the organization when people change roles or leave.
Continuous Employee Development
Everyday tasks create chances to build new skills. Informal learning complements formal training and professional development plans instead of replacing them, so together they cover both quick questions and structured growth.
Greater Employee Autonomy
Employees choose resources that fit their own questions. Supportive managers can strengthen this habit by asking what someone learned, not only what someone finished, and curiosity grows when leaders reward it.
What the Data Says
The Association for Talent Development (ATD) published a 2024 report called Informal Learning: Measuring Success Outside the Classroom. The survey drew on 297 talent development professionals. At 33 percent of organizations, informal learning made up more than half of all learning, yet only 35 percent measured its effectiveness. Meanwhile, 51 percent of respondents expected their use of informal learning to grow over the next two years, and organizations offered an average of five informal learning opportunities.
Those figures describe what practitioners reported, not proven results. The survey does not show that informal learning automatically improves productivity or retention, so treat it as a snapshot of current practice.
Informal Learning vs. Formal Learning: Key Differences
| Comparison factor | Informal learning | Formal learning |
| Structure | Often unplanned or flexible | Planned and organized |
| Learning method | Experience, observation, and interaction | Courses, lessons, and structured activities |
| Control | Often guided by the learner or workplace situation | Usually guided by a trainer or curriculum |
| Assessment | May have no formal assessment | Often includes assessments or completion requirements |
| Tracking | Can be difficult to record completely | Usually easier to track through an LMS |
| Workplace example | Asking a colleague how to resolve an issue | Completing an assigned compliance course |
The two approaches complement each other. Compliance courses, safety certifications, and regulated procedures need structure and proof of completion, while quick situational questions need fast answers from people who know the work.
Two clarifications prevent common mistakes. An informal activity can still be organized on purpose, as with a voluntary mentoring program. Using digital technology also does not make learning formal, because a chat channel full of tips remains informal even when software hosts it.
What Challenges Can Limit Informal Learning?
Knowledge Silos and Limited Sharing
Teams tend to keep useful knowledge close. Without an accessible place to store practical guidance, the same questions repeat in every department, and good ideas stay trapped in one group.
Inconsistent or Incorrect Information
Colleagues sometimes pass along outdated or wrong practices, and a habit that worked three years ago may now break a policy. Organizations need a clear review step for critical information, such as safety or compliance guidance, before anyone publishes it.
Limited Time and Managerial Support
Heavy workloads squeeze out reflection, and employees skip the five-minute debrief because the next deadline is waiting. Managers have to protect that time on purpose.
Research on leadership points in the same way. A 2026 systematic review in The Learning Organization by Vuorio and colleagues followed PRISMA 2020 guidelines and examined how individual, organizational, and leadership factors affect informal learning in knowledge work. The authors found that transformational and enabling leadership styles help, and that self-efficacy strengthens the effect.
A 2025 study by the same research group found that managers and employees both value informal learning but disagree about how visible it is and how well the organization supports it. The authors describe “symbolic autonomy,” where companies praise learning in words but provide no real mechanisms behind it.
Difficulty Measuring Learning Outcomes
Conversations and observations rarely generate records, and resource views or participation counts show activity, not skill. A video with 500 views may have taught nothing. The ATD finding that only 35 percent of surveyed organizations measured effectiveness fits this problem, and a measurement plan beats guessing.
How Can Organizations Encourage Informal Learning?
Use this six-step framework to turn scattered habits into a working practice:
- Encourage knowledge sharing. Give employees regular chances to swap tips, discuss challenges, and demonstrate techniques.
- Support mentoring and peer learning. Pair people with colleagues who have relevant experience.
- Create a searchable knowledge library. Organize approved guides, videos, job aids, and lessons learned in one place.
- Make time for reflection. Ask teams what worked, what failed, and what they learned after each project.
- Recognize knowledge contributors. Thank employees who document and share helpful practices, publicly and often.
- Connect informal and formal learning. Use formal courses for gaps that need structured instruction or assessment.
These practices work best when managers back them, and employees can trust the information they find. Without both, even a well-built library gathers dust.
How Can an LMS Support Informal Learning?
An LMS works best as the backbone of the program, not the whole body. It organizes what people learn and share, then links that knowledge to structured development. Capabilities vary by platform, so check a vendor’s feature list before you plan around any tool.
Make Learning Resources Easier to Find
A searchable library holds guides, videos, reference documents, and job aids in one place, so employees find answers in seconds instead of pinging three colleagues. eLeaP’s learning management system, for example, lets teams manage training materials and programs on a single platform.
Support Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration
Some platforms add discussion boards, collaborative tools, or user-generated content. Where available, these features let employees post a tip, attach a video, and answer each other, and shared resources then reach far more people than a single hallway chat.
Connect Informal Learning With Skill Development
Assessments reveal skill gaps and check practical understanding, and role-based recommendations can point employees to the next useful resource where the platform supports them. A system with skills and competencies tracking, observation assessments, and on-the-job training can verify what employees actually do, which a quiz alone cannot.
Learning paths then bundle informal resources with required courses, so an employee who reads a job aid today can follow a path toward a formal assessment tomorrow.
Track Learning Activity Responsibly
Resource views, participation, and assessment results each reveal something different. Views show what people open, participation shows who contributes, and assessments show whether people can apply the knowledge.
No LMS captures every informal moment, and activity data alone cannot prove learning impact. Use tracking reports to spot patterns, then confirm them with managers and employees.
Regulated teams gain one more benefit. Under the eLeaP umbrella, the QMS and LMS work together, so quality events such as CAPAs and deviations can trigger training updates and a hard-won lesson reaches every affected employee.
How Can Organizations Measure Informal Learning?
You do not need to track every conversation. Instead, collect evidence from several angles:
- Employee feedback: Ask whether people can find answers and apply new knowledge.
- Skills assessments: Check whether employees demonstrate the relevant competencies.
- Knowledge-sharing activity: Monitor contributions to internal resources and collaborative spaces.
- Manager observations: Record changes in how employees perform relevant tasks.
- Business indicators: Review measures such as error rates or resolution times, while accounting for other factors that influence results.
A simple five-step process keeps the work focused:
- Identify the skill or workplace problem.
- Establish a baseline.
- Choose appropriate learning activities.
- Gather evidence of skill application.
- Review the outcomes and adjust your approach.
Cedefop’s European guidelines describe four phases for validating non-formal and informal learning: identification, documentation, assessment, and certification. That framework helps organizations recognize what employees already know, but it is not a universal formula for measuring workplace performance, so do not treat it as one.
Frequently Asked Questions About Informal Learning
What Is Informal Learning in Simple Terms?
Informal learning means picking up skills through everyday experience instead of a planned course. For example, a customer service rep learns a better refund script by listening to a veteran’s calls.
What Are Five Examples of Informal Learning?
- Learning from colleagues
- Observing experienced coworkers
- Solving problems on the job
- Researching a topic independently
- Joining knowledge-sharing discussions
Is Informal Learning Better Than Formal Learning?
Neither approach wins outright. Formal training suits compliance, certification, and skills that need assessment, while informal learning suits quick situational questions. Most organizations get the best results by combining both.
Can an LMS Support Informal Learning?
Yes, depending on the platform. Searchable resource libraries, collaboration features, and learning analytics can all help, so confirm which features your vendor actually offers before you decide.
How Can Informal Learning Be Measured?
Combine employee feedback, demonstrated skills, knowledge-sharing activity, and relevant performance indicators. No single number tells the whole story, so look for patterns across several sources.
What Is the Difference Between Informal and Non-Formal Learning?
Non-formal learning is organized learning outside the formal education system, such as a short workshop. Informal learning commonly emerges from everyday activities and experiences with no set curriculum.
Conclusion: Make Everyday Learning More Valuable
Informal learning shapes how employees gain practical knowledge every day. Supportive managers, reliable information, and room to share knowledge turn that habit into a strength, and clear ways to recognize skill growth finish the job.
An LMS can organize resources and connect employees with useful learning opportunities, and platforms like eLeaP’s LMS and QMS suite also link everyday lessons to structured training and compliance records. Start small: find where your employees already learn from one another, then make that knowledge easier to access, share, and apply.