Building Bridges: Uniting Formal and Informal Learning Through Collaboration and Mentorship
This week, Guider teamed up with 360 Learning to delve into the pivotal role of mentorship and feedback loops in corporate learning.
360Learning CLO, David James and our CEO & Founder, Nick Ross, shared their learning and development expertise and how organisations can harness the power of collaborative learning and mentorship.
Here, we’ll share some of the top insights that will transform your approach to employee development and business growth:
- Unlocking the Potential of Continuous Learning
- The Synergy Between Mentorship and Feedback Loops
- The Importance of Formalising Informal Learning
About 360Learning
Our partner, an innovative online learning platform, empowers organisations to design, deliver, and track learning experiences and engaging training courses. Having revolutionised employee upskilling for more than 1700 L&D teams, 360Learning assist businesses looking to enhance employee development and foster a culture of continuous learning.
About Guider
At Guider, we are on a mission to make it easy for enterprises to establish, expand and monitor mentoring and peer-learning programs, enabling organisations to reach their L&D, retention and DE&I goals. Employees are matched based on chosen skills for self-service mentoring, providing a voice and giving the choice to mentees.
Unlocking the Potential of Continuous Learning
David shared insights from his time as L&D specialist at Disney, leading with a stand-out statistic that only 14% of learners see real value in the conventional annual training day, yet 63% thrive through continuous informal learning.
Continuous informal learning occurs in many forms, such as peer learning through mentoring or coaching, collaboration in breakout rooms, and learning in the flow of work. This aptly reflects our knowledge that mentoring increases employee well-being; and that those with a mentor are happier than those without.
These findings underline the need for businesses to democratise learning, and give the power to employees to choose when and what they learn, also known as a bottom-up learning approach.
Top-down and Bottom-up Learning Techniques (360Learning)
The Synergy Between Mentorship and Feedback Loops
Some of the greatest world leaders have had mentors (Forbes), and research shows that 89% of those who have been mentored will go on to mentor others.
So it goes without saying that mentorship is a powerful tool for the creation of feedback loops. This refers to facilitating effective, self-sustaining learning environments that enable and encourage your employees to learn from one another – a ‘pay it forward’ attitude.
This poses the question; why aren’t businesses harnessing the power of mentoring and why aren’t they tracking it?
The Importance of Formalising Informal Learning
As practices occur between peers sporadically and informally, organisations lack visibility of the effects, unable to monitor the positive impacts had on wider organisational goals.
Nick shared his expertise, highlighting the need for businesses to establish a formal approach to mentoring and collaborative learning, providing some staggering statistics in the benefits of mentoring:
- 70% of Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs.
- Businesses with an established mentoring solution experienced 84% growth.
- Businesses with mentoring solutions had an impressive 72% increase in productivity.
- In females and minority groups, retention and promotion rates measure 38% for those with a mentor, verses only 15% for those without.
Using mentorship programs such as Guider provides a simplified, scalable way to formalise collaborative learning that keeps users engaged. We provide real-time data insights tailored to individual and industry requirements and goals.
Where do your employees look for upskilling or peer learning?
If you’d like to learn more, speak to an expert today.
Additional resources
- The Business Case for Mentoring E-Book
- Facilitating Female Leadership
- Coaching and Mentoring: What’s the Difference?
