What's The 70-20-10 Learning Model and How Does It Work?
Bradford R. GlaserMost L&D budgets tell a pretty one-sided story. Room bookings, course licenses and certification programs – those are the line items that eat up the bulk of most organizations' learning spend. For a long time, that was just accepted as a natural part of building a capable workforce. Managers mostly assumed that formal training was the main engine behind whatever growth they saw in their teams – and the budget just kept reflecting that assumption.
Ask any employee what actually pushed their career forward, and the answers almost never point to a training room or a workbook. Most of the growth comes from experiences like a stretch assignment that felt just a little out of reach at the time, a manager who gave them honest feedback when it was needed or a senior colleague who navigated something messy and let everyone watch how it was done. Those are the moments that build capability – and not a single one of them shows up as a line item in any training budget.
The 70-20-10 model puts a name to what most of us already sense is true. About 70% of professional development comes from on-the-job work experience. Another 20% comes from those around you – mentors, peers and honest feedback. The last 10% is formal instruction – it still has value, and it works best as a foundation instead of the full package.
What makes this model worth mentioning is where it came from. The team behind it didn't build it from scratch out of pure theory – they worked backwards by asking high-performing executives to map out their own development and to work out what had shaped them most. The numbers themselves were never meant to be a rigid formula. Their value comes from nudging teams and organizations to step back and take a hard look at where they're putting their time, energy and resources.
Most of what employees learn comes from doing the work and from those around them – not from a course or a classroom. The bigger question is if your learning strategy lines up with that or if the budget is still funding the old model.
Let's talk about the 70-20-10 learning model and how it works!
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Table of Contents
Where the 70-20-10 Model Came From
To find the answer, the team went straight to the source – they asked leaders to look back across their careers and trace where most of their learning had come from. Not what they picked up in a classroom. Not what any textbook laid out for them. What shaped the way they worked, the decisions they made and how they led others.
What came back pointed in the same direction, again and again, across hundreds of leaders. A large portion of the learning they'd done wasn't from formal training programs (not even close) – it came from the work itself, from those around them and from firsthand experience out in the field.
For organizations, this research was a turning point in how they thought about employee development. The long-standing assumption had always been that training meant a course, a seminar or some type of structured program. That was all it meant – this research pushed back on that and gave businesses a new way to remember where learning actually happens day-to-day and maybe more than anything, how to be more deliberate about supporting it.
The model is built around three numbers, and each one covers a different source of learning. The next few sections will go through each of them in full detail. Before we get there, it's worth pointing out that this model didn't start as some abstract theory – it came directly from what leaders said about their own development. That's a big part of why it's held up for so long.
A framework only lasts if there's something genuine at the heart of it – and this model has been around for a long time, built from direct experience first, with the theory coming later. That's why so many organizations still use it.
Real Work Teaches You the Most
Stretch assignments are a powerful tool in any leader's toolkit. At its core, a stretch assignment is any work that sits just outside someone's comfort zone – something they've never done before or haven't quite worked out yet. The whole point is that there's no blueprint to follow – they have to figure it out as they go. That process of working through the unknown is where the learning happens.
A project management training session teaches you the vocabulary. A project gives you that experience. And the skills that you pick up by doing (by working through deadlines, tough teammates and problems with no clean answers) usually stick in a way that a slide deck almost never does.
Teams that get their employees into that tough work early (before they feel "ready") usually see much faster growth than teams that wait. Readiness is hard to define anyway, and the longer you wait for it, the more it works against you.
This connects to problem-solving. When a person hits an unfamiliar obstacle and has to figure it out without a ready answer in front of them, it builds a skill that's quite hard to teach in any other way. The work of finding an answer, that process itself, is where the learning actually happens.
That's what makes the 70% the core of the entire model. The point is to put individuals in situations that push just past their level in a way that forces some growth – not to give them more responsibility for the sake of keeping them occupied. The discomfort is intentional – it's the whole idea. When stretch assignments are handled well, they build new skills and also build confidence and sharper judgment in ways that a classroom exercise just can't do.
Peers and Mentors Can Help You Learn Faster
The "20" in the 70-20-10 model is the social side of learning – it covers what you can absorb from others around you. That includes mentorship, one-on-one coaching, peer feedback and close attention to how your colleagues actually get work done.
Formal training does have its place, and no one is disputing that. A genuine conversation with someone who has been where you are carries a different weight entirely. A mentor can look at what you're doing and tell you in plain language what needs to change and why. That direct feedback tends to land in a way that no workbook is ever going to replicate.
None of this has to be a formal mentoring arrangement either. A colleague who points out a blind spot, a manager who walks you through their own thinking or a more experienced teammate that you shadow for a day – these moments count toward your 20% (this bucket is about the knowledge that others have already built up), so you don't have to work through it from scratch on your own.
Peer feedback also deserves more credit than it tends to get. A second opinion from a person who is at roughly the same level brings quite a different perspective – one that a more senior person can't always replicate. A peer has lived through your situation from the inside. That shared experience makes their input genuinely helpful.
What makes this learning so helpful is the speed at which it can move you forward. A well-timed conversation has the ability to change how you see an entire area of your work, and it's very hard to put a number on that. Professionals who prioritize these conversations usually grow much faster than those who don't.
Formal Learning Still Has Its Place
The "10" in the 70-20-10 model covers formal learning – activities like courses, workshops, certifications and structured reading programs. Out of all three parts, it's deliberately the smallest piece – it's very much by design.
Organizations still pour the bulk of their training budgets into classroom-based learning. The 70-20-10 model puts it at just 10% of how adults learn. That's not necessarily a bad investment on its own. What it does raise is a fair question about whether that level of spending actually lines up with how adults hold onto and apply new information on the job. For organizations, that gap could be worth a second look.
Formal learning does have its place in this, especially right at the beginning when a person has no foundation to build from yet. A well-structured course gives a new employee the vocabulary, the right frameworks and the baseline knowledge they need before any of the other 90% of it can start to stick. Without that foundation in place first, experience and peer conversations alone can only carry a person so far.
Formal learning also has a natural place in fields where accuracy matters, and there's almost no room for trial and error. Medicine, finance and engineering are obvious examples of this – those certifications and accredited training programs are there for a reason. The whole idea is that they should have already put in the time with the theory long before they ever get to apply any of it to something real.
Structured learning works best when it's treated as a foundation (not the full picture) – it gives a starting point and fills in the gaps that on-the-job experience and casual conversation just can't always cover on their own. The other two pieces of this model need something stable underneath them to work well, and formal learning is what gives them that.
The Percentages Are Just a Starting Point
The biggest misconception about this model is that the numbers are supposed to be strict – and they never were.
Critics have pointed this out for years – there's no research data to back up the exact split. No large-scale study has ever confirmed that learning follows those lines so neatly. The numbers originated from observational research and executive interviews, which makes them more of a loose guideline than any fixed formula. It's a starting point – not a finish line.
The exact ratio probably doesn't matter nearly as much as the bigger idea behind it. Most of what we learn happens outside of a classroom or any formal training program – structured instruction is one part of a much bigger picture and a pretty small part at that.
The model has also evolved quite a bit over the years. Josh Bersin, a respected voice in the learning and development world, introduced the concept of "learning in the flow of work" (the idea that employees learn better when learning is part of their day-to-day work instead of separate from it), which lines up well with what the 70-20-10 model has always pointed toward – genuine growth tends to come from genuine situations.
If your organization's split ends up closer to 60-30-10 or lands somewhere a little different, the point still stands. Genuine development (the kind that actually sticks) comes from experience and human connection. The structured side does have its place, and it matters. But it's not usually where the full picture begins or ends.
Put the Model to Work for You
A place to start is to take an honest look at where your training budget actually goes. Most organizations still put the majority of their investment into formal courses and workshops, which only becomes a problem when those courses carry most of the weight. The model makes a strong case that the bulk of learning comes from the work itself, so it's worth asking if your budget lines up with that.
One natural next step is to look at what new hires and newer employees are doing in their first few months on the job. If the bulk of that time goes toward training rooms and online modules, there's likely an opportunity to bring in more experience a bit earlier. That could mean giving an employee a project to take ownership of, a chance to work directly alongside a more experienced colleague or just a seat at the table for the decisions they'd normally have no visibility into.
Mentorship is another area that's worth putting time into – and from what I've seen, it's also the one that gets the least attention. Even informal check-ins between a newer employee and someone a few years further along matter in how fast they get up to speed.
Formal training still has real value. Some skills do need a structured environment to develop, and for those, it's hard to beat that setup. The goal is to make sure that the combination goes well with how employees learn.
What This All Means for Your Team
What makes this model worth your time is that it moves the conversation away from "how much training are we doing?" and toward "how much are our employees actually growing?"
Those are two very different questions, and the space between them is where their development budgets quietly disappear. Some teams never stop to ask the second one – it's the one that matters most. At a minimum, this framework gives your team a reason to step back and take an honest look at where all that learning effort ends up going.
You have to watch the day-to-day reality of how your employees are learning. It matters whether new employees are doing actual work from the start or just sitting through modules – and whether someone is in their corner to give them honest feedback. Those two things will tell you more about your learning culture than any training calendar ever could.
The right structured training still has its place – it just works best as one part of a bigger plan instead of the whole plan. For any team that wants to strengthen that piece without having to spend months building course materials from scratch, our Reproducible Training Library Collection is worth a look.
It has over 90 ready-to-use soft skills courses on leadership, communication, conflict resolution and others – the library does the heavy lifting. Every file is unlocked and editable, so you can put your branding on them and get them in front of your team faster – in a classroom, online or as self-study. It's a strong starting point, and it frees up your time and energy for everything else.
