What Is Adult Learning Theory and Why Does It Matter
Bradford R. GlaserUsually, corporate training sessions fail at their one job. An instructor reads from the PowerPoint slides as attendees catch up on email or stare at the ceiling tiles. Attendance gets tracked and recorded, so everyone files in and fills a seat. But learning almost never takes place.
The core issue is built right into the format – these programs believe that working adults need to be taught the same way as elementary school kids. Absorb some facts and hold them in memory long enough to recite them back, and call it a success.
The old classroom-style teaching methods don't work for adults, and the reason is actually pretty simple – they skip over the way that mature brains learn and hold onto new information.
Adults walk into every learning situation with decades of experience already under their belt. They have careers, families, mortgages and a whole long list of responsibilities that college students never had to handle. Adults also need to apply what they learn very quickly – they can't tuck it away for some future scenario that might never happen.
Malcolm Knowles saw this disconnect back in the 1960s, and it led him to use the term "andragogy" to describe the way adults actually learn best. What he figured out was a different model from the way that most training programs work.
When adults get forced into mandatory training sessions, they usually hate every minute of it. But when they go after skills on their own terms, the whole experience changes. His ideas have become even more relevant.
Remote work has changed the way that professionals build careers, automation continues to push everyone toward new skills, and businesses are losing billions of dollars on training that just doesn't work for adult learners. Even worse, millions of competent workers come away from these failed programs with the mistaken belief that they're somehow "bad at learning." These problems are avoidable!
Let's talk about why you should know how adults learn – it can change the way that you teach!
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Table of Contents
How the Adult Brain Learns
Adult brains and kids' brains process learning in very different ways, and most of this difference can be traced back to how the brain develops over time. Adults actually engage their prefrontal cortex a lot more actively during the learning process than children do. In practice, adults are a lot more likely to question new information, analyze it more closely and think it through before they accept something as true.
Adult brains don't stop changing at any particular age, by the way. Neuroplasticity continues throughout your entire life, and it means your brain continues to make new connections, adjusting to the new information, regardless of how old you get. It happens a bit differently compared to childhood, though the ability is still very much there. Adults bring years (sometimes decades) of lived experience to the table, and all that experience shapes how they take in new concepts and connect them back to what they already know.
Back in the 1920s, an educator named Eduard Lindeman did some meaningful work on how adults actually learn. What he found was that grown-ups need to connect new information to their experiences – abstract concepts just don't stick in the same way. A few decades later, Malcolm Knowles built on this research and developed six main principles that describe how adults approach learning. These principles help explain why a 35-year-old in a traditional classroom setup usually doesn't produce great results.
Adults come into any learning situation with years of mental patterns already built up, and everything new has to pass through those patterns first. On one hand, this works in their favor because they can link new ideas back to what they already have. But it can get in the way, especially when what they're learning goes against the beliefs or the experiences they've carried around for decades.
Neuroscience has been able to confirm something that most teachers and educators have picked up on for a long time. Adult brains seem to learn through a more analytical process, so they're better at sizing up the information, and they use better judgment about what they're learning. But they take a bit longer to accept new information when it contradicts what they already believe or how they've always understood something.
Kids are usually more flexible when they come across new ideas, mostly because they haven't built up as many existing beliefs that might conflict with what they're learning.
How Adults Control Their Own Learning
Adults want to direct their own learning in ways that kids usually don't, and a big part of this comes from the experience they've gained over the years. Life has a way of teaching you how the world actually works and what information matters. Ten years in a field will give you a much sharper sense of where your weak areas are and which skills are worth the effort to build up.
This drive for autonomy ties directly into what gets adults motivated to learn. Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory shows us that adults pick up new skills and information much better when they feel like they have some control over the process.
Most adults look for learning experiences because they want to improve themselves or work on a problem that matters to them, and that behavior is fueled by internal motivation. External motivation works differently because a person learns mostly out of a sense of duty or obligation, or maybe it's because there's a prize or some other reward at the finish line.
This happens all of the time in the real world, and the examples are everywhere. A software developer skips the company's mandatory training session and pulls up YouTube instead to find a tutorial that actually solves the problem they're working on.
Another employee decides to sign up for a self-paced online certification program on their own instead of waiting for months for their employer to maybe put together something formal. Online courses and learning sites have grown like crazy over the past decade, and it's largely because adults want to choose for themselves what they learn, when they learn it and how fast they want to move through the material.
This puts trainers and program designers in a tough position. Most corporate trainers and educators have to work within systems that run on mandatory attendance and fixed calendars.
Adults will push back on these kinds of rigid demands every chance they get. They want control over what they learn, when they learn it and how they want to go about it. Forcing a rigid structure on adult learners without giving them any autonomy probably won't work out in the way you want, and it goes directly against the way that adults actually like to learn and absorb new information.
What Drives Adults to Learn
Adults also bring plenty of mental and emotional baggage with them when they start to learn, and this baggage can either push them forward or hold them back. One of the biggest problems I see is the fear of failure, and it runs way deeper than the same fear in younger students.
Usually, this fear has its roots in bad memories from school – experiences that happened years or decades ago but still affect how they think about learning. Imposter syndrome is another big factor, and it tends to show up strongest in professional development or training environments. A lot of adults walk around with this nagging worry that someone's eventually going to see they're not nearly as knowledgeable as everyone thinks.
Internal motivation carries far more weight than external rewards for adult learners. Time and time again, adults learn best when they have a genuine, personal reason behind their effort – maybe a big problem they need to solve at their job, or maybe a skill they've wanted to improve for their own reasons.
Time is a big obstacle for a lot of adults who want to learn something new. Adults are already stretched thin between their jobs, their families and the day-to-day responsibilities that pile up, and when they try to fit in some time to learn, it causes quite a bit of internal tension. A fair number of them carry this guilt around about the time they spend on themselves when they feel like that time should probably go toward their other obligations.
Readiness to learn isn't fixed – it changes quite a bit based on what's going on in a person's life at any given time. An adult who wants to advance in their career is probably going to be pretty motivated to pick up new skills and knowledge.
That same person might shut down and resist learning if they face some personal struggles at home or elsewhere in their life. Studies on adult learners have found that the timing matters just as much as the content itself. A person's psychological state at the time can be the deciding factor between training that actually sticks and training that just doesn't take hold.
Smart Training That Fits Your Schedule
Technology has changed education in quite a few ways, and microlearning has become one of the most practical developments for adult learners in particular. Microlearning takes bigger topics and breaks them up into short, focused modules that usually run between 5 and 10 minutes each.
This style of learning is a great fit for working adults because the average person just doesn't have 2-3 hour blocks available for traditional training sessions anymore, and it also lines up nicely with the way most of us already take in information throughout a normal day anyway.
The idea behind microlearning is pretty simple. You take a bigger topic and split it up into smaller, more digestible pieces. A busy professional can finish one module during lunch or maybe squeeze one in during that weird 15-minute difference between meetings. This format makes it a lot more possible for anyone with a packed schedule to actually make progress without feeling like they need to carve out giant blocks they just don't have.
Most modern learning systems use something called spaced repetition algorithms that help you remember what you learn. Hermann Ebbinghaus figured out the forgetting curve back in the late 1800s, and what he found was that we lose most of the new information within just a few days unless we review it again. These systems leverage this by showing you the main concepts multiple times at specific intervals designed so you hold onto them in your head.
Corporate training departments have been making the move toward this style of training, and businesses like IBM help to show us why. When IBM switched from traditional courses to microlearning, they found that employees in their programs were able to absorb almost 5 times more information in the same amount of time. Deloitte had similar findings in their own research – microlearning can cut development costs by roughly 50% compared to conventional training programs.
Mobile learning apps have expanded access for adult learners who are trying to fit education into an already packed schedule. A quick lesson on your phone can happen just about anywhere – while waiting at the doctor's office, on the bus ride to work or during a lunch break. Most adults don't have long stretches of free time available to them, so the ability to learn in these smaller windows throughout the day is what makes mobile apps work.
Just-in-time training takes this same concept and pushes it even further. With it, you're not learning the material weeks before you'll have to know it – you access it right when you have to put it into practice. Your memory retention gets way better because you're able to use what you have just learned almost right away.
Sites like LinkedIn Learning and Coursera have actually built their entire business model around this concept, and they all use AI to customize what you see and learn based on how you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish. Instead of making all students go through the exact same course material, the AI will watch how you learn best and then adapt everything to match your pace and preferred style.
The Lessons for Better Training
Adults and kids don't learn the same way, and when you see this for yourself, it does change how you should be running workplace training. Most adults walk into a training session with years of experience already behind them. Before they're willing to spend any time on something new, they need to know why it matters to them and their own situation.
Control is another big part of this – adults want at least some input on how they learn and how fast they move through the material. Give them this autonomy and relevance, and learning starts to happen instead of it being just another forgettable slideshow that nobody remembers by the next morning. Adults are looking for answers to problems they're facing now in their day-to-day roles. Any new information has to connect back to something they already know and get, or else it's just going to bounce off them and never actually sink in.
Generic training programs don't usually work, and that's mostly because they treat every learner as if they're identical. One person on your entire team might want to jump right into hands-on practice. But the person sitting next to them could use a little time to think it through mentally before they try anything new.
Learners who care about the specifics want the instructions to be broken down step by step with a great structure for them to follow, and at the same time, their teammates might do better when they can work through the bigger concepts in group conversations instead.
Organizations that take the time to understand these differences and actually design their training around them see the results that stick – better knowledge retention, stronger performance on the job and teams who actually want to continue learning new skills.
