Your Best Training Program Is Already Running—You Just Didn’t Design It
By Chapin Brinegar
Vice President of Instructional Design and Strategy
Consider a typical employee’s week. They may spend roughly 40 hours at work, and if they’re lucky, perhaps 1 of those hours is spent in formal learning.
The other 39 hours are spent solving problems, making decisions, collaborating with colleagues, navigating ambiguity, coaching others, responding to feedback, and figuring out what to do when things don’t go as planned.
These 39 hours, however, are where the real opportunities live. Unfortunately, in many organizations, Learning & Design (L&D) teams focus almost all their efforts on that 1 hour of formal training, overlooking the much larger learning environment that already exists. They miss the work itself.
The Hidden Curriculum
The good news is that the hidden curriculum is readily available, waiting to be found embedded in meetings, projects, coaching conversations, customer interactions, and everyday decisions. It’s the medical science liaison navigating an off-label question while remaining compliant and helpful. It’s the sales representative reflecting on a challenging customer conversation and recognizing where the discussion shifted. It’s the first-line manager deciding whether to coach, ask another question, or simply listen.
These moments may never appear in an LMS or on a formal learning plan, but they are shaping behavior and performance every day. You just may not be designing for them yet.
70-20-10 Was Never Really About the Numbers
Most of us in L&D are familiar with the 70-20-10 model, which states that professional growth is gained 70% through experiential, on-the-job tasks, 20% through social learning and feedback, and 10% from formal training or coursework.
Over time, much of the conversation around 70-20-10 has shifted toward percentages. How much learning is formal? How much is social? How much is experiential?
Personally, I think that’s the least interesting part of the model. The real value of 70-20-10 is its recognition that people learn by doing the work. They try something, observe what happens, receive feedback, adjust, and try again.
Somewhere along the way, we may have stopped treating 70-20-10 as a design mindset and started treating it as a reporting framework. That’s a missed opportunity.
Rather than focusing exclusively on the question, “What training should we build?,” 70-20-10 encourages us to also ask:
- What is work already teaching people?
- Where are employees building skills through experience?
- What moments are shaping confidence, judgment, or behavior?
- How could we make those moments more intentional?
Clearly, instead of designing only for the 1 hour of formal training, we should broaden our focus to include the other 39.
Experience Alone Isn’t the Teacher
We’ve all known someone who has done the same job for 10 years and somehow has never gotten better at it. That’s because experience alone doesn’t create learning. Reflection does.
The good news is that reflection doesn’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it’s as simple as pausing long enough to ask:
- What just happened?
- What mattered most?
- What would I do differently next time?
- What is one thing I want to try again?
These questions may take only a minute or two, but they help people make sense of what happened and connect experience to performance.
This is where L&D teams can have enormous influence—not necessarily through the creation of another course or module, but by embedding better questions into the work itself. That’s how learning becomes intentional instead of accidental.
Start With the Work – 3 Easy Steps
When we talk with L&D teams about embedding learning into everyday work, the same concerns often surface: limited time, competing priorities, overwhelmed leaders, and lack of a learning culture.
But those constraints are also reasons to think differently. If learning is treated as something extra, it will always compete with the work.
The question L&D teams should be asking is: How can we design within the work people are already doing?
The answer can be surprisingly simple.
Step 1: Select 1 role and 1 task.
For example, take a first-line manager running a one-on-one with a direct report. On the surface, they are simply conducting a conversation about priorities, performance, and support. Subsequent steps, however, will reveal there is an opportunity here.
Step 2: Surface the hidden skills and behaviors.
Look closer at this manager’s interaction and you’ll likely find they are practicing coaching, listening, questioning, trust building, judgment, and navigating difficult conversations. What you’re seeing is the learning already embedded inside the task.
Step 3: Identify 1 simple practice.
The next step isn’t to design for every aspect of this manager’s experience. Select 1 simple practice and make it intentional. For example, if you are concentrating on improving coaching and questioning skills, you might focus on having the manager take time to reflect before and after the conversation by asking themselves questions such as:
(Before)
- Where can I ask instead of tell?
- What question could help this person think through the issue?
(After)
- When did I step in too quickly?
- When did I allow the other person to do the thinking?
That’s it! No fancy new program. No new platform. No major rollout. Just a small moment of intention at the right spot in the workflow.
Design for the Other 39
This approach doesn’t require a complete redesign of your learning strategy. Pick 1 role, 1 recurring task, and 1 learning opportunity. Add simple practices, observe what happens, and adjust from there.
Remember, you don’t need to solve every issue you uncover right away. Nor do you require a significant budget or additional hours added to your training calendar. You just need to take a closer look at the work and have the willingness to make 1 learning moment more intentional.
As L&D professionals, we don’t have to own all 40 hours of an employee’s week. But we can become much more thoughtful about designing for the other 39. At Encompass, we’ve been helping organizations uncover and design for these everyday learning moments for years. If you’re exploring how to make learning a more natural part of work, not just another item on the calendar, we’d love to continue the conversation.
Because your best training program may already be running.
You just didn’t design it.
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Chapin Brinegar is vice president of instructional design and strategy at Encompass, where she leads a team of instructional designers and partners with clients to solve complex learning and performance challenges. She holds a Master of Science in Instructional Technology and is currently pursuing a doctorate in Organizational Leadership and Learning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With more than 20 years of experience in education, corporate training, and instructional design, Chapin is passionate about helping organizations create learning experiences that are practical, measurable, and embedded in the work people do every day.
