Learning at work isn’t a 2018 invention

The idea that work is a place to learn isn’t ten years old. It’s more than a century old. It was born with 19th-century industrialization. Until then, education was meant to shape the mind, far from any productive aim. The factory needed skilled workers, and fast, so it reconnected learning to the task, to the workstation, next to the person who already knew the job. A century later, an entire research field, Workplace Learning, took this as its subject: how do people actually learn while working?

That field established two things. The work situation is an exceptional place to learn, but the learning doesn’t happen on its own. It requires opportunities to learn, the right resources at the right moment, quality interactions. Without them, work teaches no one.

AFEST: France writes the intuition into law

In 2018, France took the leap. With the “Avenir professionnel” (Professional Future) Act of September 5, 2018, AFEST,  the country’s officially recognized form of work-based training, became a training modality in its own right, on par with a classroom course. Learning while working was no longer a tolerated workaround. It was training you could fund and had to prove.

But AFEST also shows, in the negative, why the flow of work stayed so rare. To train for real, it assembles the conditions research had identified, one by one: a work situation chosen on purpose, a tutor observing the task, a debrief that puts words to what just happened. Exactly what works, and exactly what doesn’t scale. One tutor per learner, hours of coaching per skill: artisanal and time-consuming by nature. Wonderful for one employee. Untenable for ten thousand.

2018: Bersin puts a modern name on an old idea

The same year, on the other side of the world, analyst Josh Bersin theorized the idea and named it: learning in the flow of work. His thesis is simple. For 40 years, training followed technology, the classroom, then e-learning and the LMS, then Netflix-style video libraries. At every step, employees were asked to leave their work to go learn somewhere else.

Bersin flips the logic. Training shouldn’t pull us away from work; it should come to us, at the precise moment of need. His founding observation still holds. According to the LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report 2018 he cites, the number-one barrier to training isn’t budget or motivation, it’s time: the average employee has just 24 minutes a week to learn. No wonder nearly one in two asked to learn directly in the flow of their work.

L&D’s best idea, the one no one could deliver

Here’s the paradox. Everyone buys in. Almost no one succeeds. In 2022, The Josh Bersin Company surveyed more than 1,000 organizations: 78% ranked training among their leadership priorities, yet only 12% truly cracked learning in the flow of work. A cult idea, a laughable hit rate.

Why the gap? Because what we called “flow of work” for years wasn’t. It was micro-content pushed without context, ignored notifications, scripted help bubbles. We were delivering content, never training. None of the conditions research had identified were met, not the right moment, not the right resource, not the quality interaction. What was missing was an intelligence that could understand who the employee is, what they’re doing right now, and respond like a trainer would. The promise was ahead of its technology.