The 70-20-10 model for learning and development is a framework that L&D professionals use to map out a more effective, experience-driven approach to employee growth. It suggests that real learning isn't confined to a classroom; instead, it's a blend of on-the-job experience (70%), social interaction (20%), and formal training (10%).

Think of it less as a strict rule and more as a compass, guiding you toward a balanced learning culture. This guide will provide actionable steps to implement this powerful model in your organization.

What Is the 70-20-10 Learning Model?

Let’s use an analogy. Imagine learning to ride a bike. You can read a book about it (the 10%), and you can watch a friend do it and get their tips (the 20%). But the real learning—the moment it all clicks—happens when you actually get on the bike, wobble, and figure out how to balance for yourself (the 70%).

That’s the essence of the 70-20-10 learning and development model. It’s not a precise mathematical formula, but a powerful reminder for L&D teams that true competence is built through a rich mix of experiences. It encourages us to look beyond formal courses and see the entire workplace as a learning environment.

A Quick Breakdown of the Model

To really get a handle on the model, it helps to see the three pillars side-by-side. Each component plays a unique, connected role in how people actually learn and grow at work.

The 70 20 10 Model at a Glance

By weaving these three elements together, you move learning from a one-off event to a continuous part of the job.

The big idea here is that formal training gives you the "what," but it’s the hands-on practice and social collaboration that give you the "how" and make the knowledge stick.

This integrated approach helps build a more agile, resilient, and capable workforce because learning is happening all the time, not just during scheduled training days.

Where Did the Model Come From?

This isn't some new-age fad. The 70-20-10 model has been around for decades, with its origins in research from the 1980s at the Center for Creative Leadership. Researchers Morgan McCall, Michael M. Lombardo, and Robert A. Eichinger surveyed nearly 200 executives about how they really learned to lead.

The results were eye-opening. The vast majority pointed to challenging on-the-job assignments, not formal training programs, as the primary source of their development. This finding flew in the face of the era's training norms, which were almost entirely focused on classroom instruction.

It highlighted a massive, often-ignored opportunity: the powerful, organic learning that happens every day within an organisation. You can see how these concepts connect to broader educational principles in our guide on social learning theory.

Driving Growth with On-the-Job Experience

Let's get to the core of the 70-20-10 model: the 70%. This is where the real work happens. It's the hands-on, in-the-trenches learning that comes from daily tasks, unexpected hurdles, and practical problem-solving. This is where skills are truly forged, not just taught.

Your goal is to shift from accidental learning to intentional development. L&D's role is to be the architect, actively structuring these experiences rather than hoping employees will just "pick things up." When you design them thoughtfully, on-the-job experiences don't just build competence; they build confidence and adaptability.

Designing Intentional Growth Opportunities

So, how do you structure the 70%? The key is to create scenarios that gently push employees just past their comfort zones—a challenge that promotes growth without being so overwhelming it leads to frustration.

Here are actionable strategies you can implement:

• Stretch Assignments: Give a junior marketer a small budget to lead their first social media campaign. Ask a developer to research a new framework and present their findings to the team.

• Cross-Functional Projects: Create a task force with members from Sales, Marketing, and Product to tackle customer churn. This exposes them to new perspectives and builds business acumen.

• Job Rotations: Let an employee from Customer Support spend two weeks working with the Quality Assurance team. They'll gain a deeper understanding of the product and bring valuable customer insights back to their role.

Of course, these strategies are most effective when they’re planned and supported. You can dive deeper into how to formalize these experiences in our guide to on-the-job training programs.

The difference between a simple task and a developmental experience is intentionality. By defining a learning goal for a project, providing the right support, and scheduling a debrief, a routine assignment becomes a targeted growth opportunity.

Implementing a Learning Challenge Plan

To turn these ideas into action, managers need a simple, practical tool. The "Learning Challenge Plan" is a straightforward document that helps managers and employees co-create targeted on-the-job learning tasks.

A solid plan should cover these five points:

1. The Challenge: What is the specific task? (e.g., "Lead the next team meeting.")

2. Learning Objectives: What new skill will be gained? (e.g., "Improve public speaking and meeting facilitation skills.")

3. Key Actions & Timeline: Break the challenge into smaller, manageable steps with deadlines.

4. Support & Resources: Who can help? What tools are needed? (e.g., "Manager will review agenda; access to slide deck templates.")

5. Success Metrics: How will we know the skill has been developed? (e.g., "Positive feedback from attendees; meeting finishes on time.")

This simple framework provides the structure needed to make every on-the-job experience a measurable step forward.

Using AI to Support Learning in the Flow of Work

Modern technology can supercharge the 70%. AI tools, like those inside Learniverse, bring critical knowledge directly into an employee's workflow, right when they need it most. Imagine a new project manager receiving an AI-generated checklist of key milestones or a quick microlearning module on stakeholder communication, all pulled from the project’s initial document. This just-in-time support makes on-the-job learning far more efficient, helping people apply new skills immediately and with confidence.

Building a Culture of Shared Knowledge

If on-the-job experience is the engine for employee growth, then social learning—the 20%—is the crucial connective tissue holding it all together. This is where individual insights become shared wisdom.

These interactions often accelerate learning far beyond what any one person could manage on their own. But you can't just hope for valuable chats by the water cooler. A strong 70-20-10 learning and development strategy means intentionally building an ecosystem where people share their expertise freely and often. Your goal is to create structured opportunities for employees to connect, ask questions, and learn from each other.

Fostering Intentional Social Learning

To build a true learning culture, you need to design specific channels for that knowledge to flow. When you get this right, these interactions become a powerful force for upskilling your entire organization.

Here are proven ways to structure the 20%:

• Mentorship Programs: Pair seasoned experts with emerging talent. It’s a direct line for transferring institutional knowledge, career advice, and those nuanced skills you’ll never find in a manual.

• Peer Coaching Circles: Form small, facilitated groups of employees at similar levels to share challenges, brainstorm solutions, and hold each other accountable for development goals.

• Communities of Practice (CoPs): Create dedicated channels (e.g., on Slack or Teams) for people in the same role to share best practices, new tools, and common hurdles.

Launching a Pilot Mentorship Program

You don't need a massive, company-wide initiative to get started. A well-planned pilot program can deliver immediate value and give you a blueprint for what works.

Here's a simple, five-step guide to get your pilot off the ground:

1. Define a Clear Goal: What do you want to achieve? Better onboarding for new hires? Developing future leaders? Pick one specific objective to keep your pilot focused.

2. Recruit Willing Participants: Start with a small, enthusiastic group. Look for experienced employees passionate about sharing knowledge and mentees who are eager to learn.

3. Provide a Matching Framework: Create simple profiles for participants highlighting their skills, experience, and development goals. This helps you make purposeful and effective pairings.

4. Offer Light Structure: Give them a kickoff guide with conversation starters, goal-setting templates, and suggestions for meeting cadences. This provides a clear starting point without being overly restrictive.

5. Gather Feedback: After three months, survey participants about their experience. Use their honest feedback to refine the process before you expand the program.

These programs are a powerful form of peer-to-peer learning. You can dive deeper into this topic in our dedicated guide on how to foster a peer learning environment.

Mentorship isn't just about knowledge transfer; it's about building relationships that foster trust, confidence, and a sense of belonging. A successful program strengthens both the mentee's skills and the mentor's leadership abilities.

Modern platforms can amplify these efforts. With Learniverse, for example, you can create a dedicated space for expert Q&A forums where anyone can post a question and get answers from designated subject matter experts. Our AI can even identify and share best practices from your top performers, turning individual wins into scalable learning moments for the whole team.

Making the 10% Count: The Foundation of Formal Training

It’s easy to look at the 70-20-10 model and dismiss the 10% for formal learning. But that’s a huge mistake. This structured component is the bedrock upon which all other learning—the other 90%—is built.

Think of it like building a house. The hands-on construction is the 70%, and learning from the senior carpenter is the 20%. But the 10%? That's the architectural blueprint. Without it, you’re just guessing.

Formal training provides the essential vocabulary, core concepts, and standardized processes everyone needs. It’s the spark that ignites more effective, self-directed learning back on the job.

Designing High-Impact Formal Learning

The goal isn't more formal training, but making every moment of it matter. High-impact learning prepares employees for what they’ll face in the real world. Every workshop or eLearning course should be built with the other 90% in mind.

Here are actionable tips to make your formal training stick:

• Tie it to a Business Goal: Don't just launch a sales course to "complete the course." Launch it with the objective to "increase our team's close rate by 15%."

• Prime for Application: Design content that sets people up for success. Use real-world case studies, hands-on simulations, and problem-solving scenarios that mirror their actual day-to-day challenges.

• Focus on the Must-Haves: Reserve formal training for non-negotiable knowledge—compliance rules, fundamental software skills, or core operational procedures. This ensures consistency and frees up other channels for more nuanced skill development.

This approach turns formal training from a passive, check-the-box exercise into a powerful catalyst for growth.

The Role of Formal Training in Today's Workplace

The 70-20-10 model gained traction as Canadian organizations realised that simply throwing money at formal programs wasn't delivering the results they needed. The model positions formal education correctly: as the essential starting point for hands-on practice and learning from others. This balance is especially critical for employers in regulated industries where foundational knowledge isn't just nice-to-have, it's mandatory. You can find more great insights on this balanced approach over on Global Knowledge's blog.

Formal training is the "what" and the "why." It delivers the critical knowledge and context that make the hands-on "how" of experiential learning possible and meaningful. It ensures that when employees face a challenge, they have a solid mental model to work from.

Supercharging the 10% with AI Automation

Traditional course creation is slow, expensive, and a huge drain on resources. This is where modern AI tools, like those inside the Learniverse platform, can completely change how you operate.

Imagine being able to instantly transform dense company policies, technical manuals, or new product guides into interactive, bite-sized courses. Our AI can analyze your existing documents and automatically generate:

• Engaging video lessons, complete with scripts and visuals.

• Interactive quizzes to check for understanding.

• Short microlearning modules perfect for just-in-time support.

This automation cuts development time and costs, ensuring your foundational knowledge is consistent and scalable. It frees up your L&D team to focus on high-value strategic work, like coaching and program design, rather than getting buried in content creation.

How to Implement the 70-20-10 Model

Bringing the 70-20-10 model into your organisation isn't about flipping a switch overnight. It’s a deliberate shift in mindset. Your L&D team moves from simply creating content to becoming architects of holistic learning experiences.

The idea is to build a framework that supports growth in all its forms. You don't need to tear down your existing programs. Instead, start by taking intentional steps to weave these three learning types into your company culture.

Start with a Strategic Audit

Before you build anything new, you need a blueprint of what you already have. A learning audit helps you pinpoint what’s working, what isn't, and where the real gaps are.

Start by cataloguing all current L&D activities and slotting them into one of the three buckets:

• The 10% bucket: List all formal training (workshops, e-learning, etc.).

• The 20% bucket: List all social learning initiatives (mentorship programs, peer coaching, collaboration channels).

• The 70% bucket: Identify how on-the-job learning is supported (stretch assignments, project leadership opportunities, cross-functional teams).

Most teams find they’re already doing a lot in the 70% and 20% categories. The real challenge isn’t creating these opportunities from scratch; it’s making them more intentional, visible, and supported.

Gain Leadership Buy-In

For any big change to stick, you need champions in the C-suite. Connect the model directly to business outcomes they care about. Frame the 70-20-10 model as a solution to their biggest challenges.

Present the model not as an L&D initiative, but as a business strategy to build a more agile, skilled, and engaged workforce. Show how it accelerates time-to-competency for new hires, fosters innovation through collaboration, and improves retention by investing in career growth.

Use data from your audit to highlight where your current strategy is falling short and how this balanced approach can bridge those gaps.

Design Blended Learning Journeys

With a clear audit and leadership support, you can start designing learning journeys for key roles. Instead of thinking in one-off events, map out how an employee will acquire a new skill using all three components.

For a newly promoted manager learning how to effectively manage remote teams, a blended journey would look like this:

1. Formal (10%): Start with a 15-minute e-learning module on the fundamentals of giving effective feedback.

2. Social (20%): Pair them with a seasoned manager for monthly mentoring sessions to discuss real challenges they are facing.

3. Experiential (70%): Assign them the task of leading their first team performance review cycle, supported by a practical, AI-generated checklist of best practices.

Even the formal 10% needs a solid plan. The goal, design, and launch process for these foundational pieces is crucial for setting up the other 90% of learning for success.

This structure ensures that formal training is a springboard for real-world application and social reinforcement.

The Power of an AI-Powered Approach

Implementing this model the old-fashioned way is a heavy lift. Manually creating job aids, organizing mentorship programs, and building courses takes an enormous amount of time. This is where modern AI platforms like Learniverse can completely change the game.

AI acts as a force multiplier for your L&D team. For the 70%, it can instantly generate on-demand job aids. For the 20%, it can create discussion prompts for coaching sessions. And for the 10%, it can build entire onboarding courses from your existing company documents.

Traditional vs. AI-Powered 70-20-10 Implementation

By offloading these tedious tasks, AI frees up your L&D professionals to focus on strategy, coaching, and nurturing a vibrant learning culture.

Measuring the Real Impact of Your Learning Strategy

To prove your learning strategy is working, look past simple course completion rates. For a 70-20-10 learning and development model, you need to measure what truly matters: on-the-job performance and business impact.

The goal is to draw a straight line from specific learning activities—a project, a coaching session, or a course—to the business outcomes they improve. Each piece of the model needs its own set of meaningful metrics.

Connecting Metrics to Each Learning Component

Instead of hunting for one magic number, track a portfolio of indicators across the 70-20-10 framework to see how each part contributes to the bigger picture.

Here’s a practical way to break it down:

• Measuring the 70% (Experiential): Track project success rates for teams undertaking on-the-job challenges. Measure time-to-competency for new hires to see how fast they’re hitting their stride.

• Measuring the 20% (Social): Monitor participation in mentorship programs and activity levels in knowledge-sharing channels. Use 360-degree feedback scores to see if collaborative skills are improving.

• Measuring the 10% (Formal): Assess knowledge retention with quizzes a few weeks after a course. Track the speed of real-world application—how long does it take for people to start using new skills in their day-to-day work?

Applying Kirkpatrick's Model for Deeper Insight

Kirkpatrick's Four-Level Training Evaluation Model is a fantastic way to structure your measurement strategy within the 70-20-10 framework. It forces you to move beyond simple satisfaction surveys to measure tangible change.

Level 1: Reaction – Did they find it engaging? (Mainly for the 10%) Level 2: Learning – Did they actually learn the material? (Applies to the 10% and 20%) Level 3: Behaviour – Are they using what they learned back at their desks? (Crucial for the 70% and 20%) Level 4: Results – Did their new behaviour move the needle for the business? (The ultimate goal for your entire strategy)

An integrated analytics dashboard, like the one in Learniverse, becomes indispensable here. It pulls data from all corners of your learning ecosystem into one place, allowing you to connect the dots between a formal course, a coaching conversation, and a successful project outcome to prove the real-world impact of your strategy.

Common Questions About the 70-20-10 Model

Even with a solid plan, putting the 70-20-10 model into practice can bring up some tricky questions. Let's tackle the most common ones.

A big one is always about the numbers: are they a hard and fast rule? The short answer is no. Think of 70-20-10 as a flexible framework, not a rigid prescription.

For instance, if you are rolling out new enterprise-wide software, you might temporarily shift the balance to 20% formal training to get everyone up to speed. The goal isn't to hit the exact numbers every week, but to maintain a long-term balance that champions learning by doing.

Adapting the Model for Your Company

Can the model work for a five-person startup just as well as a 50,000-employee corporation? Absolutely, but the approach looks different.

In a smaller business, you can be nimble and informal. A manager can simply tap an employee for a stretch project or set up a quick peer coaching session over coffee.

For large organizations, structure and consistency are key. You need deliberate programs to make it work:

• Formal Mentorship Programs: A structured system is essential for connecting mentors and mentees across different business units.

• Defined Career Pathways: Map out the specific on-the-job experiences needed for someone to progress into a key leadership role.

• Technology Platforms: A central platform becomes critical for managing social learning communities and delivering on-demand resources to thousands of employees.

The real power of the model is its flexibility. The what—learning through experience, others, and formal training—doesn't change. But the how should be shaped to fit your company's unique size, culture, and goals.

What if you're working with a tight budget? The best place to start is by making the existing 70%—the on-the-job learning that's already happening—more intentional. You don't need a new budget to create a simple template that helps managers define clear learning outcomes for projects. This small step makes organic development visible, measurable, and ultimately, much more powerful.

Ready to make your learning strategy more effective and less time-consuming? Learniverse uses AI to automate course creation, build interactive learning journeys, and provide the analytics you need to prove your impact. See how you can implement a powerful, balanced learning model by visiting https://www.learniverse.app.