Self-directed learning: Why your employees are training themselves

Host: [00:00:00] Welcome to Talent Talks, the L&D podcast about the future of work and the talent driving it forward. Today, learning leaders are expected to do more, do it better, and do it faster than ever before to strengthen teams, scale training, and to show results. Because when learning works, businesses move forward.

Together, we’ll explore what that really means for L&D in growing organizations, what to rethink, what to refine, and what to double down on. I’m your host, Gina Leonatos, and this is Talent Talks.

Talent Talks is brought to you by TalentLMS, the easy-to-use training platform that helps growing businesses launch faster and see results sooner. [00:01:00] Learn more at talentlms.com

On today’s episode.

Bob Mosher: Workflow learning says it is learning while working. So in the context of completing a task, I learn, but when I’m done, I have done something. I have completed work. That pivot is really important that we as L&D professionals understand because designing for in versus while is very different.

Host: Are employees already training themselves faster than organizations can keep up? In this episode, we’re joined by Bob Mosher, chief learning evangelist at Apply Synergies, to unpack the rise of self-directed learning at work. As workloads grow, time for training shrinks, and AI delivers instant answers, we ask what learning in the flow of work really looks like in 2026.

Stay with us.[00:02:00] 

Bob, it’s wonderful to have you with us today. Welcome to Talent Talks. 

Bob Mosher: My gosh, it’s an honor, friends. Looking forward to the dialogue, so appreciate the invite. 

Host: Very excited to have you here. And Bob, I know that you’ve been talking about informal and self-directed learning in some form or another for years now, and traditionally, maybe people might imagine, you know, somebody voluntarily taking an online course after work as an example of what self-directed learning is.

But in reality, workplace learning now is much messier, and it’s much more multifaceted than that. Uh, when you think about self-directed learning in 2026 and beyond, what does it really mean? What are we really talking about?

Bob Mosher: Yeah, I, I so love the question, and, um, yeah, I’ve been at this 43 years, so I’ve seen a lot in this mess that you describe, right?

And self-directed learning has been thrown around forever, uh, in our [00:03:00] industry, and it is a hope that those we serve and the performers and organizations will take on self-directed learning. My anxiousness with it is, in today’s world, is the magnitude of what that means, the rate of change, the technology available, you know, the, the nature of context and changing job roles, uh, which we’ll get a bit into in a couple questions here, is really not what it used to be when I think this, uh, idea and this category was invented, right?

And so I think there’s an expectation when I see organizations and managers in particular approach this as an ask or part of professional development, is that I think you really have to dissect the word ‘learning’ into two parts. Um, and so why… It’s casting a broad net, right? And so a degree of learning is taking on knowledge or training, and part of self-directed learning, I think, is also applying knowledge, and that whole support side, the whole performance side, I would argue, is pretty chaotic.

We’ve done [00:04:00] a wonderful job on the, I would say, self-directed training side with elearnings and these things that we’ve done in LMSs and things that have really risen to help us do that in a much more organized way than we ever could. So I think today, as those listening, if you’re a learning leader out there or a line of business manager, I think you have to be careful in casting too broad a net with what this means and really dissect it down to the expectations of training being part of it. And ways of tracking and measuring that. But also performance and application being another.

And we’re gonna get, I think, a bit into that as we go deeper in today’s talk.

Host: Oh, yes, we will. So in a survey that we recently ran at TalentLMS, we found that 86% of employees say that they’re building skills by figuring things out on the job. Not a huge surprise. Over half of the people that we surveyed in that same study said that they have little time to get training done, also not a huge surprise.

It really [00:05:00] feels like there’s a growing gap, I guess, between the speed of work and the speed of workplace learning at the moment. I think it’s a very real challenge right now. Employees need answers in real time. AI is there, Google is there, colleagues are there. Does this shift mean that L&D may need to rethink the structure of training?

Bob Mosher: I’ve been waving this flag for two decades. I honestly have, my friend. I mean, and, and what, what I’ve been saying about AI is it’s the pivot I’ve been waiting for for decades. Because we really have labored around making this shift and not frankly been challenged, if I may, or drawn to do it. And, and I wanna be careful here because I, I, I don’t at all think there’s been any malicious intent, but training is what we know, and it’s what we have always built.

So if I… If there’s anything about our industry that I’ve always found challenging is that often when we do a modality shift, we think we’re also doing an intentionality or [00:06:00] an accessibility shift, and often we’re not. We’re still using similar methodologies, similar designs, just through a new modality. A dear friend of mine s- told me years ago that, with the rate of change, we can’t train our way out of it anymore.

That is a stunning quote from a line of business owner, not an L&D person, right? And so I think this wave is crashing on the beach where we’re realizing that the rate of change has been beyond reach of training for years. These tools are accelerating the understanding of that and pushing training to move away from, I think, more traditional approaches.

Host: Absolutely. And I would love us to chat a little bit about what good self-directed learning could look like in practice, and let’s have a bit of a chat around this area. So if organizations want to encourage self-directed learning without just leaving people to fend for themselves, what does the [00:07:00] ideal environment actually look like?

What would a really good environment look like as a starting point? What might be the conditions that will help people learn well, while also still getting work done, of course? And what might that look like as a starting point? Maybe it’s at the, at the top, maybe it’s at the C level, maybe it’s at the middle level.

What are your thoughts around this?

Bob Mosher: Yeah, you couldn’t have said it better, my friend, in your question. And the answer lies in that, and that is we don’t understand the workflow. You know, I’ve been on a workflow learning kick for over two decades now, and been immersed in the methodology and the work myself in my own company.

And what we’ve learned, my friend, in going into organizations to try to create that optimum self-directed learning environment, is that without context, the learner flails. And so if we want self-directed learning to work, we have to understand the context in which the learning occurs, and that starts with workflow design or in, in, in [00:08:00] understanding from the work back and then creating tools and a both a training and a support environment that enables self-directed learning to happen while working.

You absolutely nailed it, friend. There is … A misunderstanding in our industry has been the difference between while and in. And what I mean by that is we’ve made learning available in work, and people stop work and consume it. They, they sit at their desks. They don’t go anywhere. They don’t … But they do stop work, even if it’s for five minutes, 10, 20, leave work contextually, take the soundbite, the snippet, and then go back to work and have to make the cognitive jump back.

Workflow learning says it is learning while working. So in the context of completing a task, I learned, but when I’m done, I have done something. I have completed work. That pivot is really important that we as L&D [00:09:00] professionals understand because designing for in versus while is very different. 

Host: One challenge is, I guess, people not always knowing perhaps what they most need to learn.

So you might have somebody in sales spending a portion of their time on leadership content while struggling in their current role, as an example. How can organizations guide people towards setting goals that are centered around useful learning without becoming overly prescriptive? Um, perhaps, uh, I think this is kind of quite a strong real-life scenario that I think comes up often.

Yeah. 

Bob Mosher: It is, yeah. And thank you for asking because that leads off of my last answer, which is within the workflow there are what are called critical skills. Critical skills by definition are things that are based on their outcome if I can’t do them. The criticality of outcome is either very severe, death in a hospital, if I may, right?

A seven, we use [00:10:00] a rubric, or a one, where frankly I’m just bothered. No one cares. Not no one cares, but, you know, I miss it being in work, but I catch up and no one’s really the worse for it outside of it taking maybe more time. Where I’m going with that, friend, is that when we do workflow analysis, and I want, and I wanted to get it to the design level here because we have to build something, and we have to build it intentionally, right?

So after what we call rapid workflow analysis, or take the R off, workflow analysis design, the layer you’re asking about next is then how do we decide what are the critical things to be taught? And what are the critical things that can be just, I don’t mean just ’cause that’s, that minima- sounds like it minimizes it, but can be supported through doing, while doing? Which by the way, again, is the most powerful way to learn, right?

So I wanna optimize that part of the learning experience as best I can. But to your question, friend, there are times to be trained. [00:11:00] There are times to step out of work and be sure that I get to model or practice or fail and not kill someone. And so understanding the criticality of tasks, the outcome of those tasks is, is what helps drive the outline or the workflow versus what we’ve used forever, which is the word importance.

SMEs, if everyone knows what that acronym is, that everything is important, and that’s where the three-day, five-day course was born from because we teach to importance, not criticality of performance. And in the world of self-directed learning, that distinction is really, really important in the kind of deliverable that we build.

Host: Traditionally, managers might check perhaps whether training got completed, right?

In the world of informal learning, self-directed learning, what role do you think managers can really [00:12:00] play here? What does good coaching or reinforcement look like in the flow of work?

Bob Mosher: If I feel terrible for any role in an organization, it’s leaders. They are the most underserved, overly exhausted role in most companies, right?

And typically, if this resonates with your listeners, well, how people tend to get to be l- good leaders is because they were good performers. I was a great salesperson, so now I’m a sales manager, right? I, I knew the product well, so now I’m a product manager. And the irony is one doesn’t necessarily beget the other.

And so … And part of the responsibility we put on managers is performance enablement, is, you know, guiding folks. And so back to my answer earlier, I think it takes two things. Again, it’s the clarity of the workflow, ’cause even managers we put in a room, to be honest with you, friend, they don’t know what their employees do 24 hours a day.

They, they really don’t know the workflow if they’ve risen to a manager level above it. So the first thing in order for them to help learners in the flow of work is to [00:13:00] know the workflow. They have to understand what that is. And then secondly, there are two ways they can go about it. They can either g- direct a employee, which often doesn’t cause int- internalization or transfer.

It, it often creates, frankly, a dependent learner that goes back to the manager the next time they need help. Or they can guide the performer with the tools that they have at their disposal to arrive at the answer on their own. But they have to have those tools. Those have to be available in the workflow.

But if a manager guides versus directs, the probability of self-directed learning, self-efficacy, courage to risk, those come with that kind of managing. Directing often doesn’t get that same result, and we create highly dependent learners in many organizations.

Host: What’s L&D’s role in all of that then? 

Bob Mosher: Yeah. Good for you, right? So it’s [00:14:00] back to that workflow thing again. We’ve got to be- stop becoming order takers. We’ve got to stop this quote. Someone walks in a room and goes, “I’d like five days of leadership training. I’d like three e-learnings on sales on the new CRM.” That’s retail. You know? That’s not good design, right?

So, so we, our role is to help the organization realize that we can make the workflow visible and guide them into these self-directed tools, these kinds of things. We are not just the training department. L&D is really T&D – training and development. We want to become learning and development. I’d rather become performance and development.

Therefore, we’re allowed to do a different thing, and we’re enabled to do different analyses and have different conversations. I see you nodding. I think you may agree.

Host: I am nodding very, very, uh, passionately because I think you’ve really nailed it. And a recent guest on the podcast, Kevin Yates-

Bob Mosher: Yes, [00:15:00] Kevin!

Host: Kevin was recently on our podcast, and, um, he likened it to fast food, uh, the way that L&D has traditionally been order takers, so exactly what you said. I’ll, I’ll have an order of, uh, leadership training with a side of, you know, three e-learnings. And it’s really, it’s really the old-school approach that just, it just doesn’t hold anymore in this current…

Bob Mosher: You know, and, and friend, I’ve been in this industry lo- you know, I’ve been in this industry long enough. I heard over and over again, we want a seat at the table. You know, we want to be seen as strategic, not tactical. Okay, let’s fess up here, right? If all you sell are blue shirts, why would someone buy red pants from you?

So part of it is absolutely the mindset on the business to allow us and ask us for a different deliverable. That starts with us being seen as being able to create a different deliverable and host a different narrative. Push back when they walk [00:16:00] in for five days and say, “No, I don’t know enough to know if I can give you five days.”

Don’t go, “Yes, I’ll give you five days, and then we’ll work from there.” That part of our responsibility, our role in how we’re seen, has to change. Or I don’t know if we’ll be allowed out of the order-taker role.

Host: I think there’s also the issue of simply making time. If learning is happening autonomously, and people, of course, already have deadlines and targets in their day-to-day role, how do you think organizations can encourage setting time for this learning?

My take is it’s kind of a double-edged sword because it’s about setting time, but it’s also about building it into the way that you work so that you’re not necessarily setting time aside for it, but perhaps more so building it into your practice, right?

Bob Mosher: You couldn’t say it any better, and there’s the problem.

Elearning made this problem when it came out first. This isn’t the first go-around with this, you guys. This isn’t the first time we’re trying to get learning in the [00:17:00] flow of work, right? So when we made elearning, we’re like, “My gosh, you don’t have to schedule a class. You can hop into an LMS, take a five-minute thing.”

Who wouldn’t want to do that? Well, guess what? A lot of people didn’t because it’s making learning accessible. It’s not necessarily making it relevant. Those are two very different things. I will do something that’s relevant and helpful. I know that I should stop, take the 20-minute thing on the thing, but then all of a sudden I go to work and I got…

I don’t have 20 minutes. And this idea, when I love when I hear this, Gina, ’cause it’s an indicator, “I don’t have time to do that when I’m working.” That should be a red flag that then, guess what? You don’t see it as a part of work. You see it as stepping out of work to do, and everyone has the best intentions; almost no one really does it.

So you nailed it perfectly. Workflow learning is integrating it into the workflow, so I do [00:18:00] the learning while I am working, and when I’m done, I have completed something and learned something. That little “and” and the in versus while, I mean, some of the words sound like semantics, but they make a huge difference in what we build.

So putting eLearning in to work, sure, made it accessible, but I still had to stop and find the time. Putting workflow learning while I’m working, h-holy cow! I mean, I can get stuff done quicker, faster, better, and when I’m done, I’ve learned something? Bring it on. I mean, bring it on. That nuance, while versus in is whether it works or not.

We’ve seen this over and over and over again in user data, usage data, impact data. Things that I have to stop to work, I don’t do. Things I can do while working, I do a lot of.

Host: I think [00:19:00] also for me the next step after that, so you know, you’re in the flow of work, you’re working on something, you’re building some learning into that flow of work.

But something that I think, well, that we know really, is that capability is also built through practice, right? And AI now gives us this ability to simulate conversations, scenarios, and decision-making environments at scale before the stakes are high, uh, where the risk is lower. And I mean, at TalentLMS, we’ve also recently even built in a self-guided learning playground into our platform to help kind of support this side of self-directed learning and self-directed practice.

Do you think that this could be the moment where learning shifts from knowing to doing, to being part of doing rather than being part of just knowing? And what impact do you think that could have on performance in the workplace?

Bob Mosher: It, it absolutely is, right? I love your use of practice. Practice is experience.

Practice simulates real life. [00:20:00] A lesson doesn’t, honestly. It, it, it may put a scenario in there, so I have context to listen, but that’s not the same thing, right? If I’m a, a cal- call center rep and I’m in an area that’s very controversial and that type of deal, I will wanna simulate and practice that as much as I can before I get into it.

Allison Rossett wrote a great book on performance support, and she enlightened us. This is back in the ’80s, my friend. I don’t even know if you were born back then. 

Host: I won’t answer that question. 

Bob Mosher: But she talked about the fact that we, we limit the use of tools like this to only in the moment when they’re happening, which is the epitome of the marriage of workflow and learning.

She’s like, “I get that.” But there are two other areas that adults will take time to do if they’re s- positioned well, and that is people will practice ahead of something that they’re nervous to do. They will. They’re highly intrinsically motivated. Before I’m a manager and have to do a performance appraisal, it’s not gonna go well.

I have to put [00:21:00] Mary on report. I’ve got legal things to be concerned about. I know she’s gonna blow up. I don’t wanna go into that cold. I will practice that. I don’t wanna go back and take any learning. I wanna practice that. Here’s the other point she said. Remediation. Probably the most misunderstood moment where you are at the optimum time to want to learn is when you screw up. Now, it doesn’t last long because intrinsically we start healing and we wanna ignore it.

But when something happens as adults, kids are terrible at this, they just move on to something else and deflect. But adults go, “Okay, look, I just had a really bad call. That was a bad call, and I do not wanna do that again. I do not.” If they can jump into a simulation, into a practice, and redo the exercise, they are highly motivated for a short time to remediate. 

Gina, those two moments in the world of pivoting on practice, not instruction, are [00:22:00] two highly misunderstood moments of au- autonomous learning.

But it’s about the immediacy, it’s about the relevance, because if I, if it’s, “Okay, I’ll do this after work,” hmm, you know, again, it gets back to, life is busy, and I had best intentions, but that was 9:00 this morning, and I don’t really care so much anymore. If it happened at 9:15, and I can practice at 9:17 for five minutes, oh my gosh, that to the learner is time well spent.

Host: You’re absolutely right. And it’s funny you say that because it’s something that I wanted to chat to you about, which is the really valuable framework that you’ve developed, the five moments of need. And I really think this is an amazing framework to understand how learning and when learning may happen in the flow of work.

Could you briefly just explain to us what these five moments of need are and how they kind of apply to the self-directed learning [00:23:00] situation?

Bob Mosher: I sure can. Thank you, friend. Yeah, what I love about them is it was a, it was an instructional pivot that Dr. Conrad Gottfredson gave me 20 years ago when he said, “The reality of what we do is not about content transfer or upskilling. It’s about the learner wanting to engage.” And they have five moments of need that are highly motivating to them.

But there’s a scale, right? When someone doesn’t know anything, that’s new. And if I’m new to a company or I get a new job or a new product comes out, okay, you know, I’m open to new. All right?

It’s not really motivating, frankly, but the scenarios I just described work. What if I already know products and a new version of the product comes out? More. Okay, I’d like to learn more about it so that when I sell it next time, I d- I know all the features, functions, right? The problem with both of those two things is they’re not really in the world of working yet, which is apply, solve, and change.

Those three needs, friend, are what we’ve been talking [00:24:00] about this whole time because they’re where autonomous learning, self-guided learning lives, and the nature of apply, which is better, but the nature of change, which is mm, scary, solve, which could be catastrophic. As you move up that food chain, my intrinsic desire to do what we’ve talked about goes up.

So pivoting on those moments, like I just said earlier, you screw up a call. You’re about to do something that’s hard. You know, something came out that you can get fired for if you don’t know it. Those have a different level of inspiring need out of me that, if you put me quickly in an environment that immerses me in that, optimally while I’m working, ugh, game changer.

But eLearning, if we think back to those days, a lot of it failed because it was kind of new and more for the most part. And it was a lot of new and more, and they were long, or there was assessment at the end, you know, that stuff. [00:25:00] I think what we’re talking about is moving… Still new and more is there, but moving really into the raw needs of if I can’t apply it, I fail.

If I can’t keep up, I’m behind. If I screw up, I’m, oh, I don’t know what’s gonna happen, right? Those, boy, we move into those and serve those, you have a very motivated worker. 

Host: I would argue that solve is the moment of need that has the strongest motivator, right? 

Bob Mosher: Easily, ’cause it implies mistake, right? Solve means I did something wrong, and that’s when we are most vulnerable to the outcomes of that failure.

So the quicker I can remediate and not fail again or maybe fix my screw-up, oh my gosh, nothing beats it. 

Host: And I think you’re so right with the point you make about doing it as soon as you humanly can after the event itself, because everything else will get in your [00:26:00] way afterwards, and the further you get from that moment, the less crucial fixing it in the future seems or feels.

Bob Mosher: It’s stimulus response, right? I mean, as a parent, having raised three brilliant children, I struggle finding some of the difficult moments because it’s human nature to heal and deny and let it go and brush it under the rug. And, and so yeah, the further we move away from that… And again, I wanna be careful because everyone writes it down. Everyone makes a half an hour at the end of their day. Everyone blocks off tomorrow morning with best intentions. 

But 99% of those, you guy- it goes away. They just get busy. So the more we can meet it to the need in the moment, the higher the probability of consumption, which is probably more important, the higher probability of impact.

That’s what we’re going for, is impact.

Host: What do you think organizations can do to better [00:27:00] support the habit of self-directed learning?

Bob Mosher: This is gonna be a bizarre one because it starts with the environment that you’re in. Your manager. Your… Right? If, if… How many companies have had the suggestion box, but if you put a suggestion in there, it never gets answered, or you get yelled at for your suggestion?

All of a sudden, the open office and the suggestion box thing goes dry. Well, let’s do autonomous learning. Let’s let learners experiment and risk during work so that they learn through experience, and nothing’s more powerful. And then I screw up, and I get reprimanded, right? Or, you know… And I also think autonomous learning is not a muscle that we naturally exercise. So the manager has to understand what that means, right?

And how do I coach my performer through autonomous learning and not have them just fall back on me because I’ll just help you anyway, right? There’s your help desk. [00:28:00] You know, when I call the help desk, does it answer my question or does it go, “You know what? You could learn this on your own. Can I show you where you might find that?”

That change in answer promotes autonomous learning, and it also says that, by the way, it’s safe to have done that. The number one inhibitor is context. You have to have context. We’ve talked about this ad nauseam, right? But the next ones are the culture in which I’m allowed to, encouraged to do it with a structure that I understand is the secret sauce. Right?

So we put so much on the learner, and that’s where it lands, but this culture and the support mechanisms and the tools around them are ultimately the enablers that let me go, “Okay, I’m in. I’ll, I’ll try.”

Host: Amazing. What do you think as we, as we look to start wrapping up, what do you think would be a practical example there of how could a team manager or a team [00:29:00] lead take those first steps to kind of either set the example or set the expectation without it sounding like an order or direction?

Because at the end of the day, this needs to feel self-directed, right? The individual needs to feel accountable and motivated to do this themselves. So as managers or team leads, what can we do, in your opinion, Bob, to kind of better set our teams up to kind of push themselves and motivate themselves to learn of their own volition in the flow of work?

Bob Mosher: Well, I think it starts by expectation setting, right? You have to let them know that it’s okay. You have to put the stake in the ground and say, “Look, we encourage experiential learning here. We’ve given you these tools to help you do it. Training, the learning team’s gonna teach you how to use them. All those pillars are in place, so as your manager, I’m saying go for it.

And by the way, I wanna hear how it’s going. I want you to come to me when it doesn’t go [00:30:00] well, and I want you to know that when you do, I’m gonna say great, and I’m gonna walk you back through- The tools you were taught and where you found things, and it was safe to have risked and tried that. And then as managers, we have to be okay of saying, it’s like the suggestion box.

“Okay, I just put that out there,” but the minute I reprimand somebody for doing it, it’s over. It’s over. So the suggestion box without taking suggestions is a dead suggestion box. Well, autonomous learning without the guardrails to do it, and failure will be, not might, is going to be a part of that journey.

How safe is failure? How transparent are we about it? How collaborative am I as a manager with my learner when they fail, and help them see that that was okay because they did what I told them, they risked to try, right? And so I love your question because it’s like there are intentional competencies and behaviors that a manager can exhibit [00:31:00] that elicit this kind of response.

But they have to have thought about that, have a plan in place, make that apparent, and follow through with it. Or I don’t know an employee that would risk to cross that line on their own without that support. 

Host: Absolutely. Making it safe and making it absolutely okay to fail, and setting the expectation that both of those things kind of go hand in hand, really.

Learning and failing, there’s not one without the other. 

Bob Mosher: Absolutely, and there’s no better teacher, honestly. When I used to coach trainers, they would do this sometimes in class. They’d go, “Whoa, whoa. Okay, wait, wait, wait. Before… I know what you’re going to do. I know what you’re going to do. Before you do that, I want you to stop because it’s not going to work.

Let me show you how you…” And I’m like, “Why did you say that?” You know, why not let them wade into that? And you’re in a classroom. Who cares? No one’s going to get hurt. You know, let them wade into and go, “What happened? Did, did it not work the way you thought?” “Oh, [00:32:00] yeah.” “Let’s go back and walk through what happened.”

That failure and remediation is the strongest teacher on the planet. We just have to give it guardrails so people don’t hurt themselves or others, right? But too often, my friend, it’s either you allow it or you don’t. There’s shades of gray here.

Host: There absolutely are. Bob, we’ve just wrapped up an amazing conversation.

I thank you so much for the insights that you’ve shared. I really believe there’s so much that we can act on in terms of the whole area of self-directed learning, guiding our teams to do their best learning on the job on their own. Uh, I think there’s so much opportunity here, and I’m so glad that it’s a conversation that is still taking place.

Maybe it’s taken … Maybe it’s been a little bit dormant for a while, but it’s good to see that it’s definitely back on everybody’s radar, and I couldn’t think of a better person to have the conversation with than you. [00:33:00] So thank you. Thank you for being part of Talent Talks today.

Bob Mosher: Well, thanks so much, friend.

So appreciate the invitation and dialogue. Thank you.

Host: Courses build knowledge. Practice builds capability. Learning Playground is TalentLMS’s AI-powered practice space where learners can rehearse conversations, explore new topics, and apply what they’ve learned in realistic scenarios. So training doesn’t just get completed, it turns practice into performance.

Thanks for tuning in. In the next episode, we’re looking at what it takes to scale L&D successfully. You can find Talent Talks on all podcast platforms. Subscribe now so you don’t miss an [00:34:00] episode.