Latest / Career Skills with Fexingo: Hard Skills, Soft Skills, and Future-Proofing Your Career / The 70-20-10 Rule Is Wrong About Learning
Transcript
- Lucas: Luna, have you ever heard someone say 'seventy percent of learning comes from experience' and just nodded along? Luna: Absolutely. It's practically gospel in corporate training. The 70-20-10 rule, right? Lucas: Exactly. It gets cited in onboarding decks, leadership programs, even individual development plans. The idea is that 70% of what you learn comes from hands-on work, 20% from interacting with others, and only 10% from formal courses or reading. Luna: And it sounds reasonable. You learn more by doing than by sitting in a classroom. But is it actually true? Lucas: Well, that framework was developed in the 1980s by researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership. They interviewed executives and asked where they'd learned the most — and the pattern they saw was roughly 70-20-10. It was never a rigorous quantitative study. It was more of a heuristic. Luna: A heuristic that got calcified into a rule. So what does the data actually say today? Lucas: In late 2024, researchers at the London School of Economics and a workplace analytics firm called Gartner — not the IT research Gartner, a different one — published a study of 3,000 knowledge workers across industries. They tracked how people actually spent their learning time over six months using time diaries and device logs. Luna: Device logs? So they could see what people were actually doing, not just what they reported? Lucas: Exactly. Self-reports are notoriously unreliable. People overestimate formal training because it feels virtuous. The study found the real ratio was closer to 55-25-20. So experience still dominates, but it's not 70%. And the informal social part — conversations, Slack threads, shadowing — is a bigger chunk than the old model suggested. Luna: That makes sense. I learn more from asking a colleague a quick question than from sitting through a two-hour webinar. So the old rule was wrong. Why does it matter? Lucas: It matters because if you're managing your own career — and most of our listeners are — you might be allocating your time as if the old ratio were true. If you think 70% of your growth comes from just doing your job, you might not actively seek out the other 30%. And that other 30% — the social and formal pieces — is where you differentiate yourself. Luna: So what does a smarter allocation look like? I mean, we can't all just block off eight hours a week for LinkedIn Learning. Lucas: No, but you can do a personal learning audit. Here's a concrete example from the study. They followed a product manager at a mid-sized SaaS company — let's call her Priya. She tracked her learning time for two weeks and found she was spending about 80% on task-related trial and error and only 10% on peer conversations and 10% on reading. Luna: That's even more skewed than the old rule. Lucas: Right. So she restructured her week. She started a weekly thirty-minute 'learning lunch' with two colleagues from other teams. She replaced one hour of random blog reading with a focused course section. After three months, her quarterly review score went up by 12% — and she attributed it to being able to articulate concepts more clearly, not just doing more tasks. Luna: The 'learning lunch' is a clever idea. It's social, it's structured, but it's not a huge time sink. So the 55-25-20 becomes a target to aim for, not a rigid prescription. Lucas: Precisely. The researchers emphasize that the ratios vary by role and seniority. A junior developer might need more formal training early on. A senior leader might lean heavier on peer networks. But the key takeaway is that the 70-20-10 model is too passive. It assumes learning will happen just because you're working. Luna: And that's dangerous in a fast-changing field. If you're just doing your job, you might be learning your current role but not preparing for the next one. Lucas: Exactly. So here's my advice: take one week and track how you actually spend your learning time. Use a simple spreadsheet or a note app. Then compare it to the 55-25-20 benchmark. If your experience slot is way above 55%, look for ways to shift some time into the social and formal buckets. Luna: And for the formal bucket, it doesn't have to be a certification. Could be a podcast episode, a book chapter, a short online module. Lucas: Right. The key is intentionality. The old rule made learning sound like a byproduct. The new data shows it's something you can actively shape. And in a world where skills half-life is shrinking — we talked about that in episode one — being deliberate about how you learn is a competitive advantage. Luna: So the 70-20-10 rule isn't useless. It's just a rough starting point. The real question is: what's your personal ratio, and is it working for you? Lucas: Exactly. I'd love for listeners to try that audit this week and see what they find. Who knows — you might discover you're learning a lot less than you think, or that you're over-investing in the wrong kind of training.