Learning Resolutions: Help Companies Deliver Their 70:20:10 Strategy

If you ask most HR, Training & Development, OD, and Talent Management leaders, they will be familiar with these statistics: 70:20:10 which means:

• 70% of development happens on the job
• 20% of development happens through coaching and mentoring
• 10% of development happens through formal training which includes instructor led workshops and elearning courseware

The first statistic makes sense as we grew up with parents telling us to practice our spelling words, coaches telling us to practice making the shot and teachers asking us to practice playing the piano. Parents, teachers, coaches know that practicing a skill helps a person become better at the skill.

This applies to on-the-job training. Employees will become better and better when they practice the designated way to negotiate, resolve conflict, provide feedback, delegate work, and the list of on the job competencies goes on and on. Most companies spend the vast majority of their training budgets on formal training rather than on focusing where they can get the biggest return on their training investment—on the job. According to a study titled “Bridging the Gap – Integrating Learning & Work” conducted by Towards Maturity, “94% of respondents seek to speed up the application of learning back into the workplace and only 23% feel they achieve this.”

Clearly, the respondents in this study would like to adopt the 70:20:10, and the majority are looking for solutions to accomplish this. Vado’s New Year’s Resolution is to help companies deliver on their 70:20:10 strategy.

Here are a few tips to consider to deliver your 70:20:10 strategy:

1. Provide your learners with step by step instructions making the course easy to apply on the job.
2. Incorporate video into your courses. Make it high definition videos for a crisp, engaging learning experience.
3. Use short courses so that the learner can start and complete a course when they need training on the topic. Some call this “training at the point of need.”
4. Last, make your courses mobile so that learners really can take the course “at the point of need.” 

If you would like to see an example of these four design tips to deliver your 70:20:10 strategy, you can check out Vado’s courses on OpenSesame. All of Vado’s 300 management development and employee soft skill development courses are optimized to deliver your 70:20:10 strategy and are available on OpenSesame and OpenSesame Plus.

Cindy Pascale is the CEO and co-founder of Vado and has 16+ years of HR, Training & Development and OD leadership experience and 12 years running talent management, development and assessment companies. Vado is the e-learning courseware provider ‘changing the face of learning.’