SHRM26 Debrief · Modern Employee Experience · #3772

Invisible Learning: Learning That Happens While Work Gets Done

with Lyndy Forrester

▶ Watch on the SHRM portal ~58 min, distilled

invisible learninglearning in the flow of workskills gap

"We know that this invisible learning and the real learning where the rubber hits the road is happening in the 90% outside of your LMS."

What it was about

The vast majority of real workplace learning, 90% by most estimates, already happens outside the LMS: on-the-job experience, mentorship, informal conversation. AI now makes it possible for organizations to capture, structure, and scale that "invisible learning" instead of relying on formal courses and completion tracking.

By the numbers

80%

of leaders think the training being offered in their organizations is just fine (2025 data)

more than half

of employees say current training is not enough (2025 data)

12x

better organizational responsiveness for high-performing learning organizations

Key notes

Shift measurement from completions and hours logged to capability, readiness, and proficiency, since those metrics actually connect learning to business outcomes.
Build low-tech invisible learning programs now (cohorts, mentorships, gigs, job shadowing) rather than waiting for AI tooling to be in place.
If launching a cohort or learning community, assign someone to actively moderate, post new content, and ask provocative questions, or it will go dormant within about 60 days.

The contrarian takeTracking course completions and compliance hours, the standard LMS metric HR has relied on for decades, is the easy but wrong thing to measure. It doesn't reflect real capability or business impact, and most L&D leaders privately can't say whether their workforce has the skills the organization actually needs.

Take this back Monday

Do this for your team

Pick one team (e.g. new-manager onboarding), whiteboard how learning actually happens now, and pilot a mentor or job-shadow pairing.

Say this in your next leadership meeting

90% of real learning happens on the job, not in our LMS, so we should measure capability and readiness, not completions.

Watch out for

Assuming employees are satisfied with current training just because leadership thinks it's adequate (80% of leaders think training is fine, but most employees disagree).
Relying solely on completion and compliance tracking because it's easy to measure, instead of tying learning to actual business outcomes.
Launching a learning community or cohort and then walking away without ongoing moderation, causing it to go inactive within 60 days.

Fun fact · Lyndy Forrester

Lyndy Forrester once oversaw Campus Police as part of her HR portfolio while leading Amarillo College to a 'Best Colleges to Work For' honor.

If this landed, see these

↳ Go deeperEmployee Experience & Technology: How Self-Service Portals, Mobile Apps, & Digital Tools Are Changing ExpectationsSame shift toward the informal and self-directed, applied to portals and tools instead of learning content.⇄ The counterpointThe Heart of the Matter - Why the Work of HR MattersWarns against chasing new capability metrics: HR's job is still one person at a time, not measurement systems.✦ The unexpected oneTalent Intelligence on a Shoestring: Turning HR Data into Board InsightsSame insight elsewhere: you already have the data, the work is translating what's hiding in plain sight.