How Learning Really Works at Work: Two Learning Approaches

Editorial Note
This essay is part of the Cultivated canon — a body of work concerned with how people learn, grow, and create value through their work. It reflects a core belief of this library: that learning only really matters in work when it changes behaviour.

How Learning Really Works at Work: Two Learning Approaches

Learning sits at the heart of Cultivated.

Not learning as content consumption, certification, or theory — but learning as something that shows up in how people think, act, and behave at work.

Over time, I’ve come to believe that most workplace learning falls into two broad modes.

The first is information acquisition.

This is the consumption of information. Reading books. Attending courses. Watching videos. Capturing notes. Building incomplete personal knowledge systems. It is the pursuit of understanding and recall — knowing about something.

Information acquisition has value. It provides language, models, and perspective. But on its own, it rarely changes how work actually gets done.

At work, information that is not put into action remains inert.

You can know how something should be done without ever being able to do it. There is a real difference between understanding an idea and embodying it through practice. Possessing information does not mean you have capability. There is often a gap between knowing and doing.

Which brings us to the second mode: task acquisition.

Task acquisition is learning by doing. It is the act of performing the work itself and getting better through repetition, reflection, and adjustment. The photographer who learns by shooting. The manager who learns by managing. The business owner who learns by running the business day after day.

This form of learning is powerful because it is grounded in reality. Consequences are immediate. Feedback is unavoidable. Behaviour is shaped through experience, not explanation.

In work, I almost always start here.

However, task acquisition alone has limits too. Without reflection, people can simply repeat the same mistakes with increasing confidence. Experience becomes habit, not improvement.

The real power comes when information and task acquisition are combined.

Information sharpens practice. Practice tests information.

You take ideas into the work. You try them. You notice what holds up and what collapses under scrutiny and application in real conditions. Learning accelerates because it is anchored to reality.

This can work in either direction. Sometimes you start with information and discover its limits through action. Other times you start with action and realise that new information would help you improve further.

The two modes reinforce each other.

But there is an even more powerful layer.

Teaching.

When someone learning a task is paired with someone who is already excellent at it, learning becomes visible, guided, and faster. This is on-the-job learning in its purest form.

The work is real. The feedback is immediate. The standards are clear.

All managers are teachers, whether they recognise it or not. When teaching is done alongside real work — not abstract training — it changes behaviour far more effectively than courses or content ever can.

This is how ability actually grows in organisations.

Not through sending people away to learn, but by supporting them while they do the work. By combining action, information, and guidance in the flow of work itself.

Training that does not change behaviour is waste.

The most effective learning cultures are those where people are encouraged to try, supported to reflect, and guided by those who have already walked the path.

That is the model Cultivated returns to, again and again.

Because learning only matters when it shows up in what people actually do.

And that is where value is created.

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Editor’s note: This essay grows from an earlier exploration in another medium. The thinking remains central, even as the format has changed.