Jennings, who is director of learning think tank The Internet Time Alliance and former chief learning officer at Reuters, was speaking at Learning Technologies 2015 in London.
He claimed that evidence suggests the closer to work people learn, the more impactful the learning is and advised HR and L&D professionals to “depart from traditional processes”.
He said: “Moving from point solutions [learning away from work] to continuous embedded learning and moving from structures to social and experiential learning creates greater value.”
Jennings cited 2012 research from Deloitte that found organisations with strong informal and social learning capabilities were three times more likely to excel in terms of talent development.
He said bringing context to learning is “critical”. “We need to bring the context of how we are going to use what we learn as close as possible to the learning process,” he said.
He added: “If you want to improve employee engagement forget about doing all the fluffy stuff and just make sure that your managers support their people to learn in context and embed learning in the workplace. It will give you not just a lift…but a significant change.”
