Let Them Choose: Cafeteria Learning Style for Adults

PREFACE: WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

As practitioners who design workplace learning experiences, we share a passion for transforming workplace learning to appeal to learner curiosity, influence behavior change, and generate meaningful, relevant experiences. Throughout our careers as learning professionals, we have observed a tendency of resistance to learning among those who seemed skeptical about workplace training in general. Some of the assumptions we witnessed include training classes are a waste of time; the content is generic and doesn’t help with individual roles and responsibilities; and learners don’t feel engaged in training in a personally meaningful and productive way.

Learning through experience is one of the most natural, basic concepts ...