Adult Learning
Adult Learning applies Malcolm Knowles' andragogy: design from what the learner needs to know, not what you want to teach, and build around their existing experience and immediate application.
Six principles line up in build order, from the learner's need to know down to tapping their intrinsic motivation.
Reach for this when…
- A training session is being built as if for schoolchildren, not adults with jobs.
- Participants sit through content that never connects to what they actually do.
- You're designing an induction or course from scratch and want it to stick.
How to run it
- Design learning from the participant's need to know.
- Draw on participants' existing experience as a resource.
- Make learning problem-centred rather than content-centred.
- Connect learning to immediate application in real roles.
- Allow self-direction wherever possible.
- Tap intrinsic motivation rather than relying on external reward.
A worked example
Situation. Chanda Mwansa ran onboarding at a private clinic chain in Lusaka, Zambia, and new nurses sat through content-heavy inductions that didn't stick.
Applied. She rebuilt the induction around Knowles' principles: opened with why each protocol mattered to their actual caseload, and let senior nurses draw on their own experience instead of lecturing at them.
Result. New hires reached full competency about two weeks earlier, and the clinic's supervisors stopped hearing 'nobody told me why this mattered' in the first month.
The catch
Knowles built this around adults with some life and work experience to draw on - it maps poorly onto early-career staff with little to reference. Treating it as a checklist rather than a design lens produces box-ticking, not better learning. And self-direction can unsettle participants used to being told what to do.
If the content still opens with 'here's what you need to know,' you haven't actually applied it.
Origin: Malcolm Knowles (Andragogy)