We Know How Adults Learn. So Why...

We’ve Known This for Forty Years. Why Is So Much Training Still Missing It?

In 1984, I was in graduate school learning about Training and Development. Ron and Susan Zemke published an article with a wonderfully confident title: “30 Things We Know for Sure About Adult Learning.”

Some of its language now sounds dated, and “for sure” makes me smile. More than forty years of research have taught us to be cautious about claiming that anything applies to all adult learners. Yet much of the article sounds as though it could have been written for today’s trainers and instructional designers.

Adults want learning that addresses real problems. They need to connect new knowledge with what they already know. They benefit from participation, practice, and feedback, including feedback that may challenge ideas or practices that need to be reconsidered or unlearned. They want their experience respected and some control over the learning process.

None of that sounds revolutionary today.

So, if we have understood these principles for more than forty years, why does so much workplace training still ignore them?

We still begin with content instead of the problem

The Zemkes argued that adults pursue learning because they have a use for the knowledge or skill. Learning is usually a means to an end, not the end itself.

Yet training is still commonly organized around what someone wants to communicate rather than what employees need to accomplish.

The subject-matter expert asks, “What information should we cover?”

The adult learner is asking, “What will this help me do?”

Those questions can produce very different training.

Content-centered design tries to fit everything we know into the available time. Problem-centered design begins with a workplace situation and identifies what learners must understand, decide, or do to handle it successfully.

One practical way to make that shift is to begin the design process with a real workplace scenario. Ask what successful performance would look like, what commonly prevents it, and what learners must be able to do differently afterward. Only then should we decide what content is necessary.

Relevance should not be something we explain after presenting the content. It should determine what content belongs in the training to begin with.

We still confuse explaining with learning

The Zemkes warned against long lectures, endless sitting, and the absence of practice. Four decades later, we have found more technologically advanced ways to make the same mistakes.

The lecture became the webinar. The handout became the slide deck. The page of text became the narrated e-learning screen.

The delivery changed. The learner’s role often did not.

Listening to an explanation may be part of learning, but it is not evidence that learning has occurred. If employees will need to make decisions, have conversations, operate equipment, or solve problems, they need opportunities to practice those skills during training. Practice makes perfect. I’m holding back from a rant about executive summaries that give the illusion of knowing.

That can mean working through a realistic case, practicing part of a difficult conversation, diagnosing a problem, demonstrating a procedure, or making a decision and explaining the reasoning behind it. Practice does not have to be elaborate, but it should resemble what learners will be expected to do at work.

A trainer’s presentation can feel clear and engaging while producing very little change in workplace performance.

The better question is not, “Did we cover it?” but “What did learners do with it?”

We still underuse what adults bring with them

Adults arrive with experience, habits, opinions, successes, and failures. The Zemkes considered that experience an invaluable instructional asset.

It can be an obstacle as well.

New information that fits what learners already believe may be accepted quickly. Information that challenges their experience may meet resistance, even when it is correct. The learner is not merely adding a new idea. Sometimes the learner must revise an old one.

That requires more than a polished explanation. It may require comparison, discussion, experimentation, and time to work through the conflict.

It also requires feedback that is honest without being demeaning. Respecting a learner’s experience does not mean treating every conclusion drawn from that experience as correct. The goal is to challenge the idea or practice without diminishing the person.

Trainers can do this by asking learners to explain the reasoning behind their current approach. They can then compare that approach with the results it produces, introduce an alternative, and allow learners to test it. A thoughtful debrief can help learners decide what should be retained, what needs to be revised, and what may need to be unlearned.

This is usually more effective than simply announcing that an established practice is wrong. It allows the learner to examine the evidence and participate in reaching a new conclusion.

Good training does not ignore prior experience or automatically defer to it. It brings that experience into the learning process, where it can be examined and connected to new ideas.

We still expect practice to look like mastery

The article also recognized that adults have “something real to lose” in a classroom. Trying an unfamiliar skill in front of coworkers can threaten a learner’s confidence and reputation.

Today, research on mindset gives us another way to understand that risk. If learners believe a successful person should get something right on the first attempt, difficulty can feel like evidence that they lack ability. Yet expecting a first attempt to be perfect is neither realistic nor consistent with how people develop skills.

Practice is not a test of whether someone already possesses the skill. It is how the skill is developed.

Telling learners to participate is therefore not enough. Trainers must create conditions in which people can attempt something, receive feedback, make adjustments, and try again without feeling humiliated. That can include practicing first in pairs or small groups, separating early practice from formal evaluation, establishing clear guidelines for feedback, and allowing more than one attempt.

The goal is not to produce identical performances. Learners need to work within the necessary standards and parameters while discovering how to apply the skill through their own abilities, judgment, and insights. Feedback can identify what worked, clarify where the performance fell outside those parameters, and suggest one specific adjustment before the learner tries again.

This does not mean lowering expectations. It means replacing the unrealistic expectation of immediate perfection with the expectation of purposeful improvement.

If learners interpret every difficulty as failure, they will avoid the very practice they need. If they see practice as a process of trying, adjusting, and improving, struggle becomes part of learning rather than evidence that they cannot learn.

We still expect training to work alone

Even effective practice does not guarantee that learning will reach the workplace. Employees also need opportunities, reinforcement, and systems that support the new behavior.

A well-designed course cannot produce lasting change when managers discourage the behavior, workloads prevent its use, or workplace incentives reward the old way of working. Training matters, but training never operates alone.

Before training, managers can clarify why the new behavior matters and where employees will be expected to use it. After training, they can provide opportunities to apply it, discuss early attempts, remove obstacles, and recognize progress. Trainers can support the transfer by supplying job aids, follow-up practice, coaching questions, or brief refresher activities.

If the workplace continues to support the old behavior, the old behavior will usually win.

Perhaps knowledge was never the main problem

The training profession has gained new research, new terminology, and powerful new technology since 1984. But the fundamentals identified by the Zemkes remain stubbornly familiar:

• Start with problems that matter to the learner.

• Connect new knowledge to previous knowledge.

• Use learners’ experience without becoming trapped by it.

• Challenge ideas and practices without diminishing the person.

• Replace passive exposure with participation and practice.

• Provide specific, useful feedback and an opportunity to try again.

• Give learners meaningful responsibility for learning.

• Make it safe to be a beginner.

• Create workplace conditions that support the new behavior.

The surprise is not that a forty-year-old article got so much right.

The surprise is how often we still get those things wrong.

Before chasing the next training trend, platform, or technological breakthrough, perhaps we should ask a more uncomfortable question:

Are we consistently practicing what we have claimed to know for forty years?