Will Thalheimer and the Answer to Who Learns What from Where

---First, apologies if I cover ground pounded by others elsewhere, but I'm still catching up from the Guild Annual Gathering (have some more on that coming soon).

Will Thalheimer just brilliantly asked a great question - who do you learn from? He asked this of retail clerks but you have to wonder how different the results would be for the typical office worker population. Will highlights several key results on his blog; a couple of them are:

• People learn the most from those who they work closely with.
• People learn the most from their experience doing the job.
• People learn the most from their self-initiated efforts at learning.

Is it just me or are these things that seem to be fairly self-evident? The question then has to become, if you believe that they are self-evident, what the hell happened to our design and budget priorities? Seriously, look at the chart people - e-learning comes in at "Learn Some"...square in the middle. Look at the power in the hands of the 'head clerks' in the individual departments. How much of your corporate training is focused in a 'train the trainer' mode of those people?

Maybe we all need to read SWAY: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior and try to understand how we got here.