How do Adults Learn?
In an increasingly diverse workplace individuals with unique circumstances each learn different subjects most effectively in the way or ways best suited to their personal learning styles. Unfortunately most workplace and almost all online training is developed with the requirement that the participants have to adapt to the learning program, and so most training doesn't work. Developing effective learning programs requires understanding & application of the right learning practices for Adults:

1. Relevance:     All Adult learners have a high need for the relevance of what they are learning to the reality of what they are expected to do on the job. It is essential to answer the learner's question "What's in it for me?"
2. Constructive:     All learners need to make sense of the learning in terms of their own life experience, and even more importantly, their lack of experience.
3. Application:     Judgment and Actions don't change because we ask learners to change, learning requires putting the training to work — Adults learn by doing...
4. Unlearning:     Real learning often means giving up the ways of valuing, thinking and acting that the Adult Learner has become very comfortable with — an often painful but essential process.
5. Self-Esteem:     Adults usually resist change when they are made to feel insecure. Since learning is all about change, the Adult Learning environment has to be a safe place for the learner to take risks and make mistakes by providing the learner with immediate feedback that is honest, fair, and always respectful.
6. Style:     Adults develop individual learning styles for different subjects that are unique to their situation. We can use learning style models to generalize about learners: some are visual, some are auditory and others are kinesthetic learners. Some are theorists, some are pragmatists, others are reflectors and still others are activists — Effective Adult Learning Programs need to support and deliver to all these styles.
7. Control:     Adult Learners only get what they want to get from learning programs. They will see, hear and think what they want to believe unless they actively participate in reaching another conclusion.
8. Collaboration:     Whether through individual study or group activities, Adult Learners gain more competency more quickly when they are able to bring together their own strengths and experiences with the strenths and experiences of others.
9. Assimilation:     "Rome wasn't built in a day" may be a tired cliché, but it is an interesting point in the context of Adult Learning. Even if we could build Rome in a day, it still takes a lot longer than a day to be comfortable finding your way around the city. Learning takes time, and it takes planning, preparation and practice to truly assimilate new ways of doing things.
10. Renewal:     Learning is never done. No matter how good we are at what we know, we are in a constant state of getting better and worse at different skills and competencies — which compounds the challenge of an everchanging world. Adult Learning is very much like gardening, a balance of planting new seeds, weeding, and nurturing what is already there...


Delivering Adult Learning Programs more effectively has been proven to increase the return on investment (ROI) in Training and Development by as much as 500%, and can actually reduce the annual training costs per employee by as much as 50%.