Informal Learning: Examples and How to Support It
What informal learning is, with workplace examples: peer coaching, mentoring, communities of practice, on-the-job problem solving, and how to support it.
Informal Learning
What it is, what it looks like at work, and how to get more of it without building a program
The best support person I ever hired never completed a single course we assigned her. She sat two desks from the colleague who handled escalations, and for three months she listened. When that colleague left, she was already doing the job. We had a training plan on paper. Almost nothing that made her good came from it.
I only understood what had happened when we hired the next person. Same checklist, same documents, different room, and a different shift. Six months in, she was still escalating the cases the first hire had learned to handle by ear. The gap was not talent, and it was not the training we designed. It was who she could overhear.
Informal learning is the name for what happened at that first desk. This guide covers what it is, how it differs from formal and non-formal learning, what it looks like in practice with examples you will recognize from your own team, what it actually costs, how to support it without turning it into a program, and where it collides with pay and safety rules. I built training modules and onboarding tasks into FirstHR for the part that has to be documented, because the rest of what makes somebody good at a job still happens in conversations nobody scheduled.
What Is Informal Learning?
Informal learning is skill and knowledge development that happens outside any designed program: no curriculum, no instructor, no completion record, and usually no plan. It is driven by the learner and triggered by whatever task is in front of them right now.
Three features separate it from everything else on a training calendar. Nobody designed it in advance, so no objective is written down anywhere. The learner decides what to learn and when, usually because a task demands it. And there is no record, which is why it is invisible in every training report you will ever run.
That invisibility is the practical problem. A company can see its course completions and its compliance deadlines. It cannot see the 20 minutes a supervisor spent explaining a refund exception, even though those 20 minutes changed how one person does the job for the next two years.
Informal, Non-Formal, and Formal Learning
The difference comes down to two questions: who designed it, and whether anything records that it happened. Formal learning is designed in advance and documented, non-formal learning is organized but never assessed or credentialed, and informal learning is neither designed nor recorded.
| Dimension | Formal Learning | Non-Formal Learning | Informal Learning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who designs it | The company or an outside provider, in advance | Someone internal, loosely, one session at a time | Nobody, or the learner in the moment |
| Typical form | Compliance course, certification, structured onboarding module | Lunch session, internal workshop, a walkthrough recorded for the team | A question at a colleague’s desk, a mistake and its correction, a manual read under pressure |
| Objectives | Written and measurable | Loose, set by whoever runs the session | None. The task supplies the objective |
| Attendance | Assigned and tracked | Invited, and usually voluntary | Not applicable |
| Evidence it happened | A completion record | A calendar invite, and maybe a recording | Somebody can do something they could not do last month |
| Who controls the pace | The program | The facilitator | The learner |
| Best for | Rules, safety, credentials, and anything you must prove | Shared context, cross-team visibility, and new tools | Judgment, exceptions, tacit know-how, and speed |
The middle column is where most small companies live without naming it. A Friday session where your bookkeeper walks two colleagues through the month-end close is not informal: somebody planned it, invited people, and chose the content. It is non-formal, and it is often the cheapest upgrade available, because it converts one person's private knowledge into something a room can ask questions about.
The line matters for one reason. Anything you might need to prove later belongs in the formal column with a record attached. Everything else can stay informal at no loss, and usually works better there. The 70-20-10 model exists because of that imbalance: it assigns most professional development to experience and relationships rather than to courses.
Informal Learning Examples
The clearest informal learning examples are the ones nobody logs: an employee asking the person next to them how to handle an exception, a new hire copying the phrasing a colleague uses to calm an angry customer, or a bookkeeper searching a vendor help center mid-task instead of filing a ticket. Six categories cover almost everything you will see on a small team.
Peer Coaching: The Most Common and the Least Noticed
Peer coaching is two people at a similar level taking turns helping each other improve at something specific, with no trainer and no curriculum. It is the most frequent informal learning at a small company and the easiest to overlook, because from the outside it looks like two colleagues talking.
The federal Office of Personnel Management describes coaching as an experiential development process that facilitates change and growth in individuals and groups, and mentoring as developmental support from a more experienced member of the organization. The distinction is useful at small scale, because peer coaching requires no seniority. In a 12-person company nobody is senior in everything, and the person who knows the most about your billing system may be the newest hire.
What starts it is a named request, not an open invitation. Ask whoever just solved something hard to spend 10 minutes showing one specific colleague how they did it. Unassigned encouragement produces a warm feeling and no sessions.
Communities of Practice
A community of practice is a group of people who share a craft and keep learning it together, organized around the work rather than the org chart. Etienne Wenger and William Snyder brought the idea to a management audience in Harvard Business Review in 2000, describing it as a new organizational form that complements existing structures such as teams and business units and galvanizes knowledge sharing. Wenger had coined the term earlier with the anthropologist Jean Lave, while the two of them were studying apprenticeship as a model of learning.
At 30 employees you will not build one internally, and you should not try. Your people are already in several: the shift managers trading advice in an industry association group, the bookkeeper in a forum for the accounting package you use, the two developers in a language community. The useful move is not to found a community. It is to notice which ones your team already belongs to, and to pay the membership fee without being asked twice.
The closest internal version is a standing 30 minutes where everybody doing the same job compares cases: two support reps, three installers, or the whole sales team. Keep it about specific situations rather than status updates, and it stays useful. Turn it into a reporting meeting and attendance decays within a month.
On-the-Job Problem Solving
On-the-job problem solving is informal learning at its purest: a task arrives with no instructions, the person works it out, and the solution becomes knowledge. It teaches faster than any course, and it teaches whatever actually happened, correct or not.
That last part is the catch, and it deserves saying plainly. Experience is a reliable teacher of habits, not of correct habits. Somebody who has resolved a billing dispute the wrong way three times has learned a procedure, and it is now their procedure. The only cheap correction is a person looking at the work while the memory of it is still fresh.
This is why five minutes of review after a first attempt beats an hour of instruction before it. Ask what they tried, what happened, and what they would do differently next time. The questions do most of the teaching, and the answers tell you which parts of the job your written material never covered. Structured on-the-job training is the formalized version of the same instinct, with a named trainer and a record.
What Informal Learning Looks Like by Role
Informal learning takes a different shape in every job, and the shape tells you where to intervene. In customer-facing roles it is mostly imitation, in technical roles it is mostly troubleshooting, and in back-office roles it is mostly one person quietly holding a process nobody else has seen.
| Role | Where the learning actually happens | What it produces | What quietly blocks it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer support rep | Overhearing how colleagues handle hard calls, and comparing notes after a bad one | Tone, timing, and the judgment to know which exceptions are worth making | Remote work with no shared channel, and a queue too full to debrief anything |
| Bookkeeper or office manager | Working through the first month-end close, and searching the software vendor’s help center | A working process that exists only in one head | Being the only person who has ever done it, so nobody can correct or inherit it |
| Shift lead in a store or restaurant | Covering an understaffed shift, handling a walkout, and watching a manager defuse a customer | Decisions made under pressure without a manager in the room | Schedules that never overlap the new lead with an experienced one |
| Field technician | Diagnosing a fault the manual does not describe, and riding along with a senior tech | Pattern recognition that shortens every future call | Solo routing from week one, which is efficient and teaches nothing |
| Salesperson | Losing a deal and hearing why, then listening to a recorded call from someone who won one | Objection handling, and a sense of which deals are real | No forum where losses are discussed without blame |
Two patterns run across all five. The learning happens at the point where the work gets hard, and it stops happening the moment the person is isolated from anyone who has been there before. Those are the two levers you have, and both are scheduling decisions rather than training decisions.
Why Small Businesses Run on Informal Learning
Small businesses depend on informal learning because they have no realistic alternative. A company without a dedicated HR person is not going to build a course library for a job that three people do, and it should not try. The advantage is that the raw material is already there.
A small team has two structural advantages that enterprises spend real money simulating. Everybody can see everybody, so a new person picks up small lessons all day just by being in the room. And the person who knows the answer is one desk or one message away, with no ticket queue in between. Both advantages evaporate quietly the moment shifts stop overlapping or the team goes remote without a substitute channel.
The first number is the one I would sit with. Your team is already learning on its own initiative, which means the real question is not whether to start informal learning. It is whether any of that effort points at work you actually need done, and whether the answers ever make it back to anybody else.
What Informal Learning Actually Costs
Informal learning is not free. It bills the time of whoever gets interrupted, and the bill lands on your most capable people, because those are the people everybody asks.
Do the arithmetic once. If your best operations person fields 8 questions a day at 6 minutes each, that is roughly 4 hours a week, or 10% of their capacity, spent running a training program nobody budgeted. Some of those answers are worth far more than 6 minutes. But when the same question arrives for the fourth time, you are paying a premium for a document that does not exist, which is the argument for a small library of just-in-time resources covering the tasks people perform rarely and under pressure.
The second cost is quieter. Knowledge that lives only in conversation leaves in a resignation letter, and a process only one person has ever run is a single point of failure that announces itself on the day they walk out. Uncorrected habits are the third: informal learning produces bad ones as reliably as good ones whenever nobody reviews the work.
How to Support Informal Learning Without Turning It Into a Program
You cannot schedule informal learning, but you can create the four conditions it needs: time, proximity, permission, and correction. Every move below is one of those four, and none of them requires software or an HR department.
The order matters more than the list. Proximity and permission cost nothing and change behavior within a week. Written material is worth building only after you have watched what people actually ask, which is why I would rather run a cross-training rotation for a month than write procedures for a job I have not seen anybody struggle with yet.
The sheet below is the scheduling version of all six moves, and it is the only arranging this approach needs. One row per person who is learning something, the name of the person they are learning it from, the dates their hours actually overlap, the first attempt they have been handed, the debrief already sitting on both calendars, and the duty they rotate into next. It is a rota rather than a curriculum. Every column is a decision somebody makes in a calendar, which is why a row with no dates in it means nothing has been arranged yet and the newer person is still working it out alone.
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Person learning | Who they are learning it from | Proximity plan (seat, shift overlap, shared calls) | Overlap runs from / to | First attempt assigned | Debrief booked for | Where their questions get answered in public | Duty they rotate into next | Escalations per week at start / now |
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| 12 | Book the debrief when you assign the task | Not after it goes wrong. Fifteen minutes and three questions: what did you try, what happened, what will you do differently | |||||||
| 13 | Every column here is a calendar decision | If a row has no dates in it, nothing has actually been arranged and the newer person is still learning alone |
Keeping What Gets Learned
The cheapest capture rule I know is this: the third time a question gets answered, the person who asked writes down the answer, not the person who answered. The asker still remembers what confused them, and the expert has already forgotten that it was ever confusing.
Counting is what makes that rule usable. Keep the questions in the words they were asked in, mark each one again when it comes back, and treat the third mark as the moment an answer has earned a written version. Anything under three stays in conversation, which is the part most people get backwards: writing something up for every question is how the effort dies inside a fortnight, and the questions that never repeat were never worth the maintenance they would have cost.
Everything else is placement. A written answer filed in a folder is found by people who already know it exists, so link it from the task where the question comes up and pin it in the channel where it gets asked. That is the whole difference between a knowledge base people use and a folder people ignore, and it is why a written procedure beats a long recording for anything performed under time pressure.
Onboarding is where this compounds. A new hire generates more good questions in their first month than your whole team will produce in the following year, and those questions are free research into what your documentation is missing. Assigning an onboarding buddy is not only about making somebody comfortable. It is about routing that month of questions to a person who will notice the pattern.
Where Informal Learning Meets Pay and Safety Rules
Two boundaries constrain informal learning, and both are easy to cross without noticing. Learning time during work hours is generally hours worked for nonexempt employees, and training the law requires cannot be satisfied informally, because informal learning produces no record.
Under the federal wage and hour regulations, attendance at lectures, meetings, and training programs does not count as working time only when all four of these conditions are met: attendance is outside the employee's regular working hours, attendance is in fact voluntary, the course is not directly related to the employee's job, and the employee performs no productive work while attending (29 CFR 785.27). Most informal learning fails at least two of those tests on its face, since it happens on shift and is directly about the job.
In practice the risky case is not the conversation at a desk, which is plainly work time and nobody disputes it. It is the short video or the written guide that reaches a phone, gets opened before a shift starts or after it ends, and never appears on a timesheet. For nonexempt employees those minutes are hours worked too. Either say clearly that learning content is accessed on the clock, or expect the time to be claimed later.
| Situation | Informal is enough | What still needs the formal version |
|---|---|---|
| A new hire learns the refund process by asking a colleague | Yes. Nothing here needs a record | Nothing, unless the refund policy itself requires a written acknowledgment |
| An employee watches a coworker run equipment before using it | As a supplement only | The required safety training, delivered before exposure to the hazard, with a completion record |
| A supervisor explains the harassment reporting process in a hallway | Useful, and not sufficient | The mandated training where a state requires it, in its required format and duration, with a record |
| Somebody reads a manual at home on a Saturday out of curiosity | Yes, if it is genuinely voluntary and not job-directed | Nothing, but if you asked for it or it is directly job related, treat it as hours worked |
| A team member teaches themselves a tool the business depends on | Yes, and it is worth encouraging | A short written procedure, so the knowledge does not leave when they do |
How to Tell Whether Informal Learning Is Working
You cannot measure informal learning directly, because it leaves no record. You can measure four things around it, and none of them requires new tooling.
| Signal | What to look at | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Time to independence | How long before a new person handles a task class without escalating | Whether proximity and debriefs are working, or whether the person is learning alone |
| Repeat questions | How many times the same question arrives from different people | That the informal channel is carrying a load a short written answer should carry |
| Process coverage | How many people can run each critical process end to end | Whether knowledge is spreading, or sitting in one head as a single point of failure |
| Where people say they learned it | Ask in one-on-ones what they learned last month and where it came from | If every answer is a course, the informal side is thin. If every answer is trial and error, nobody is correcting the work |
Repeat questions is the number I would actually watch. It is easy to count, it points at a specific fix, and it moves within weeks. The rest are worth reviewing once a quarter alongside a skills gap review, which forces the question of who on the team can actually do what.
Common Mistakes with Informal Learning
Five mistakes account for most of the damage, and the first one is the one well-intentioned managers make immediately after deciding informal learning matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is informal learning?
Informal learning is what people pick up while doing the job, with nobody having designed the lesson. Nothing is scheduled, nobody is teaching, and no completion record exists afterward. The learner decides what to learn and when, and the trigger is almost always the work in front of them: a task with no instructions, a customer question nobody anticipated, or a tool that behaves in a way the manual did not describe. It covers peer coaching, mentoring conversations, shadowing, communities of practice, self-directed research, and plain trial and error. Its defining feature is that nothing records it, which is why it never appears in a training report even though it produces most of what people can actually do.
What are examples of informal learning at work?
The clearest examples are the ones nobody logs. A new hire asks the person at the next desk how to handle a refund above the approval limit. A support rep listens to a colleague take a difficult call and copies the phrasing. A bookkeeper searches a vendor help center mid-task rather than filing a ticket. Two installers walk a complicated job together before either one quotes it. A shift lead talks a new supervisor through a scheduling conflict and explains the reasoning, not just the answer. Someone reads the equipment manual because the machine is making a sound it did not make yesterday. Each one changes what a person can do, and none of them generates a record.
What is the difference between formal and informal learning?
The difference is design and documentation. Formal learning is planned in advance by the organization or an outside provider, carries written objectives, is assigned and tracked, and produces a completion record you can show an inspector or an insurer. Informal learning is designed by nobody, driven by the learner, triggered by an immediate task, and leaves no record at all. Formal learning is the right tool for rules, safety, credentials, and anything you may need to prove later. Informal learning is how people pick up judgment, edge cases, and speed. They are not competitors: the formal layer gives the informal layer something correct to build on.
Is non-formal learning the same as informal learning?
No. Non-formal learning sits between the two. Somebody organized it, invited people, and chose the content, but it carries no formal objectives, no assessment, and no credential. An hour set aside for one person to show two colleagues how a monthly process runs is non-formal. A recorded walkthrough of a new tool, an internal lunch session, and a voluntary workshop all belong in the same category. Informal learning has no organizer at all. The distinction is practical rather than academic: non-formal sessions are the cheapest way to turn one person’s private knowledge into something a room can question, and they take an hour to arrange.
How do you support informal learning in a small business?
Nobody can put informal learning on a calendar, but four conditions make it far more likely: time, proximity, permission, and correction. Seat or schedule the newer person near the one who knows the answers, and on a remote team, overlap their hours deliberately. Book short debriefs after first attempts instead of training before them. Make asking cheap by answering questions in a shared channel where everyone else can read the answer. Pay for the outside communities your team already belongs to. Correct early, while a new habit is still soft. None of that is a program, and none of it requires an HR department.
Can informal learning replace formal training?
No, and trying is where companies get into trouble. Anything you may need to prove later has to be formal: required safety training delivered before exposure to the hazard, mandated harassment prevention in the states that require it, licensing and certification, and policy acknowledgments. Informal learning produces no record, so it cannot satisfy any of those. It also produces bad habits as reliably as good ones when nobody checks the work. The practical split is simple. Formal training covers the floor everyone must stand on. Informal learning covers everything above it: exceptions, judgment, tone, and speed.
Do you have to pay employees for informal learning time?
Usually yes, for nonexempt employees. Under the federal wage and hour regulations, time spent in lectures, meetings, and training does not count as working time only when all four conditions are met at once: it happens outside regular working hours, attendance is genuinely voluntary, the subject is not directly related to the person’s job, and no productive work is performed. Informal learning during a shift fails at least two of those on its face, because it happens on the clock and is directly about the job. The risk case is not the conversation at a desk. It is short learning content pushed to a phone before or after a shift.
How do you measure informal learning?
You cannot measure it directly, because it leaves no record, so measure the things around it instead. Track how long a new hire takes to handle a task class without escalating. Track repeat questions: the same question arriving for the fourth time means the informal channel is carrying a load a written procedure should carry. Track how many people can run each critical process, since informal learning that never spreads is a single point of failure. Ask in one-on-ones what someone learned in the last month and where it came from. If every answer is a course, the informal side is thin. If every answer is trial and error, nobody is correcting the work.