People like to learn in a room with other learners. There is a shared experience. The chance to build relationships and share ideas in person. But when time is critical, workloads are increasing and budget holders are asking hard questions about the costs of being ‘away from work’, L&D professionals have to come up other ways of learning.
The Old Trade-Off: Work or Learn
For most of L&D history, development and delivery competed for the same hours. A training day meant a day out of the business. A qualification meant evenings and weekends. The assumption baked into that model was that learning has to happen somewhere separate from doing — a classroom, a course, a platform you log into once the real work is done.
What ‘Flow of Work’ Changes
Learning in the flow of work flips that assumption. Instead of stepping out of the task to learn about it, the learning happens inside the task itself. A manager preparing for a difficult conversation gets support while they’re preparing for it, not on a course three months earlier. Development stops being a scheduled interruption and becomes a natural part of how the work gets done.
Why This Matters More Than It Used To
Workloads haven’t shrunk to make room for more training days — if anything, the opposite. Teams are leaner, timelines are tighter, and the manager who used to have a day a quarter for development now barely has an hour a month. If development can’t fit inside the working day, for a huge number of people, it simply won’t happen at all.
The Difference Between Convenient and Effective
It would be easy to assume this is purely about convenience — squeezing learning into gaps in the calendar. It’s actually about effectiveness. Skills practised in the context they’ll be used in transfer far better than skills learned in the abstract and hopefully applied later. A negotiation technique rehearsed the morning of the actual negotiation sticks in a way that the same technique taught six weeks earlier rarely does.
Building Development Into the Day, Not Around It
This is the principle we’ve built ele around: development that sits inside a manager’s actual working day, ready the moment it’s needed, drawing on decades of Crisp’s coaching and training expertise rather than a generic search engine’s best guess. Not instead of great facilitated learning — alongside it, filling the gaps between the courses where the work happens.
