By George Hall
In a related article, When Learning Feels Like a Vulnerability, I argued that learning can feel personally risky for adult learners, especially in an environment of constant change. People do not only absorb content. They also interpret what “needing to learn” may imply about their competence, status, confidence, role, and future value.
That idea becomes even more important as organizations continue to move toward skills-based talent strategies and continuous learning models.
In a skills-based economy, learning is no longer an occasional event attached to a course, promotion, compliance requirement, or new system rollout. It is becoming a permanent condition of work, even a major stressor. Employees are increasingly expected to reskill, upskill, adapt to new technologies, rethink roles, and demonstrate new capabilities on an ongoing basis—and fairly quickly.
That raises an important question for L&D: If learning is becoming faster, more continuous, and more consequential, why do so many learning systems still isolate learners in self-paced content?
I suggest that self-paced content alone may not be nearly enough for continuous learning.
Without any doubt, self-paced learning has value. It can be efficient, scalable, flexible, and convenient. It allows people to access content when they need it. It can support compliance, foundational knowledge, product training, technical updates, and performance support.
But self-paced learning also has limits. Many learning systems still treat learning as an individual transaction: assign the module, complete the course, pass the quiz, and earn the badge. That model works best when the learning task is clear, bounded, low-risk, and mostly informational.
But much of the learning organizations now need is not like that. Skills-based strategies require a different design. They require people to build capabilities, not merely complete content.
Continuous learning requires people to keep adapting, not simply finish a course. AI, automation, changing roles, and shifting business models ask people to rethink what they know, how they work, and, ultimately, where their value comes from.
That kind of learning is not only cognitive. It is also emotional and social. A new skill can raise questions about old competence. A new technology can make existing expertise feel less secure. A new role expectation can feel like criticism of past performance. A feedback conversation can feel like exposure.
At the very moment learning is becoming more central to work, many learners may need more social support, not less.
That is why social learning matters more now.
Social Learning Is Not Just a Format
Social learning is often treated as a nice-to-have feature added to formal instruction: a discussion board, a cohort activity, a peer exchange, a community of practice, or a reflection prompt.
But that framing is too narrow.
In a skills-based economy, social learning should not be understood merely as interaction around content. It should be understood as part of the learning architecture itself: the social and emotional structure that helps people ask questions, test ideas, practice judgment, receive feedback, and stay open when learning feels personally risky.
That distinction matters.
In a defensive culture, social learning creates the conditions in which people can stay engaged with difficult ideas long enough to learn from them.
People often need other people to help them think:
- They need to hear others reason their way through complexity
- They need to see peers ask questions they were afraid to ask
- They need to practice disagreement without rupture
- They need to discover that uncertainty is shared
- They need to see that changing one’s thinking does not have to mean losing face
This is not soft. Far from it.
It is foundational.
If people cannot risk being wrong, they cannot learn deeply. If they cannot tolerate discomfort, they cannot examine assumptions. If they cannot stay in conversation across differences, they cannot develop judgment.
Social learning is not just interaction around content. It is part of the emotional architecture that helps people stay open when learning feels personally risky.
Relationship, Not Just Interaction
The fact that learners are interacting does not mean social learning is automatically happening:
- A discussion forum is not automatically social learning
- A breakout room is not automatically social learning
- A cohort is not automatically social learning
- A community of practice is not automatically social learning
Social learning happens when people are able to share and use one another’s experience, questions, mistakes, examples, and perspectives to deepen their own understanding.
That requires design.
- It requires facilitation
- It requires norms
- It requires trust
- It requires attention to the emotional climate of the learning environment
This design approach aligns with a long tradition of research that treats learning as social, situated, and participatory. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) work on situated learning argued that learning is not isolated inside the individual mind; it is shaped through participation in practices and communities. Mezirow’s (1997) theory of transformative learning is also relevant because it emphasizes critical reflection on assumptions and frames of reference, which, understandably, is difficult to do when learners feel threatened or exposed.
These insights, however, are becoming impossible for L&D to ignore. In a skills-based economy, learners do not simply need access to content. They need opportunities to compare experience, interpret feedback, practice judgment, test new behaviors, and make sense of changing expectations with others.
What This Means for L&D
If organizations want continuous learning, they need learning systems designed for more than completion:
First, Design for Trust Before Content
Learners are more likely to engage difficult material when they understand why it matters, how it connects to their work, what will be expected of them, and whether the environment is safe enough for honest participation.
Second, Design Social Learning as Architecture, Not Decoration
Do not add peer interaction at the end. Build it into the learning model. Use cohorts, mentoring, peer review, communities of practice, collaborative problem-solving, structured dialogue, and facilitated reflection to help people move through uncertainty together.
Third, Design for the Emotional Experience of Learning
Ask where learners may feel exposed, defensive, overwhelmed, ashamed, skeptical, or unsafe. Then design supports that help them stay engaged.
Fourth, Design for Practice, Feedback & Disagreement
Many important capabilities require judgment, not just knowledge. Judgment develops through conversation, comparison, tension, evidence, and reflection. Learners need low-stakes opportunities to try, fail, reflect, disagree productively, and try again.
Finally, Design for Intellectual Humility
People need the ability to reconsider assumptions without experiencing that reconsideration as humiliation. They need to distinguish being wrong from being worthless.
Together, these may become some of the most important learning capacities of the next decade.
Conclusion
The shift toward skills-based talent strategies and continuous learning makes social learning more important, not less.
Self-paced content will continue to matter. It is useful, scalable, and often necessary. But self-paced content alone cannot carry the full burden of continuous capability development.
When learning feels personally risky, people need more than access to information. They need environments where they can ask questions, test ideas, hear others think aloud, practice new behaviors, receive feedback, and stay open long enough to learn.
The future of L&D may depend less on producing more content and more on designing learning systems that combine content, practice, feedback, social support, and trust.
Because learning is not just the movement of information into an individual mind. It is the movement of people through uncertainty, together.
References
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.
Mezirow, J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 1997(74), 5–12.
World Economic Forum. (2025). The future of jobs report 2025.
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Image credit: Edwin Tan
