Lifelong learning starts not with training, but with practice

I have had this conversation often enough by now to know how it goes. There is a neat plan for lifelong learning, with a personal budget, a platform full of training courses and a sentence about personal ownership. Everyone at the table considers it important. And when you ask a year later how much of that budget has been spent, it turns out that half remains unused and most of the rest has been spent by people who were going to continue learning anyway.

Nobody is angry about it, because nothing went wrong in the execution. The plan was sound, the training was sound, the intention was sound. It is just that very little happened.

The explanation usually given is that people are too busy. That is also true, in the sense that people do indeed say so. The OECD found that more than two in five adults who do not participate in education and training cite work or family commitments as the reason. I believe them. But that still does not explain anything, because those same people do find time for all kinds of things that are not necessary either. Being busy is the form in which we express that something was not worth making room for.

What actually happens with education and training

This is where it gets uncomfortable. The same OECD figures show that the participation gap between people with medium to high levels of skills and people with low levels of skills averages more than thirty percentage points, with peaks above forty. Participation is therefore lowest among precisely the group that is hit hardest when work changes.

In Education at a Glance 2025, the OECD calls this by name: the Matthew effect, whereby those who have already learned a lot retain easier access to new learning opportunities, while those who have not increasingly fall outside them. Of highly educated people with the strongest problem-solving skills, 74 percent participated in education and training, compared with 42 percent of their equally highly educated colleagues with the lowest skill levels.

And then there is the question of what that participation actually consists of. The OECD found in Trends in Adult Learning that short, compliance-oriented training dominates the picture and that formal learning is actually declining: on average, only eight percent of adults are still enrolled in a formal education programme. A substantial part of what is recorded as development in annual reports is therefore the mandatory information security module and the refresher course in first aid and emergency response.

This creates the picture of a country in which lifelong learning is concentrated among people who were going to continue learning anyway, in a form that mainly meets obligations. That is different from a country that does not learn, and it also calls for a different solution.

The place learning is given determines whether it happens

Where I think lifelong learning gets stuck is something simpler than motivation. Learning is almost everywhere organized as something that exists alongside the work. A course, a day, an enrollment, a moment you have to make time for. And everything that exists alongside the work loses out to the work. Not occasionally. Structurally, because the work has a deadline and a colleague who is waiting, while the course does not.

As soon as learning requires a decision, you also lose everyone who is unsure whether it is meant for them. That is a larger group than you might think, and it overlaps precisely with the group in the OECD figures. People who are not used to learning underestimate their own learning needs, are less likely to sign up, and thus neatly fall outside the system that was intended for them.

The reflex is then to push harder. A campaign, a conversation during the annual review cycle, a manager who encourages it. I have seen that work for exactly one cycle, after which it bounced back.

What does make a difference is lowering the threshold so far that no decision is required anymore. Ten minutes, at the workplace, focused on something that will come up this afternoon. Then nobody needs to consider themselves a learning type.

What there is to learn then

There is an honest limitation to this, because this certainly does not apply to everything. If you want to become a welder, you need to go to school. If you need to manage a new system, you need training with an exam at the end. For professional knowledge and certification, the traditional route is simply the right route, and I am not going to pretend that you can solve that with short exercises on the work floor.

What it does concern is the part of the work that has shifted most rapidly in recent years, and which also happens to be the part that education and training is least equipped to address. The OECD states in Skills in the AI age that AI is shifting skills demand unevenly across sectors and levels. In practice, you see this shift mainly in conversations. The standard question is handled by a system, the exception ends up with a person, and that person then has to explain, weigh options, sometimes disagree, and usually also deal with the other person’s emotions.

Those are soft skills, and they cannot be put into a course that you take once. They require repetition in situations that resemble real work. The World Economic Forum estimates that 59 out of every 100 workers will need upskilling or reskilling before 2030. If you take that seriously, you cannot wait for everyone to sign up.

The question I would ask

I would therefore turn the question around. Instead of asking what kind of offering you need, I would ask when people at your organization practice.

That sounds small, and it is the whole crux of lifelong learning. A fixed moment in the week when a team spends ten minutes working on one conversation produces approximately fifty practice moments per person over a year. A two-day training course produces two, and I am being generous in how I count them.

This is also what we built PractAIce for. Employees have a conversation with an AI avatar in a scenario based on their own work, so not a generic case about a fictional company but the customer, colleague or patient they will encounter this afternoon. The AI coach then provides feedback on what was actually said, linked to the competencies the team itself considers important. If the conversation got stuck at one point, you use a microtraining to return to precisely that moment instead of repeating the entire conversation. Two to four minutes.

What is attractive about this is not the technology. It is that the threshold becomes low enough for the people who otherwise would never have signed up. Someone who never goes to a course will do a ten-minute conversation if their team does it after the morning briefing and it is about their own work.

We previously wrote about why short formats in themselves are not yet a solution in Microlearning: the new way of learning only works when there is also practice. Short is a prerequisite, not a guarantee.

What you get out of it

There is a second benefit that often only becomes apparent after six months. When people regularly practice in similar situations, a picture emerges of what someone can actually do. That is different from a list of completed training courses, and it is useful for career conversations, reassignment and the question of which roles within a team are actually already covered. We wrote about this in Skill passport: why your job profile becomes outdated faster than your people.

Lifelong learning then becomes less of a promise to the individual and more of a characteristic of the organization. Something you do because that is simply how things are organized, just as you do not decide every morning whether you feel like attending the morning briefing.

Frequently asked questions about lifelong learning

What does lifelong learning mean?

Lifelong learning is the idea that people continue to develop throughout their entire careers, including outside formal education. In the Netherlands, the term lifelong development is often used because it also includes informal learning in the workplace.

Why do so few people engage in lifelong learning?

Participation is lowest among the group that has the most to gain. This is partly due to time and money, and partly because people who have had little education underestimate their own learning needs and are therefore less likely to come forward.

How much time does workplace learning take?

A short exercise takes eight to twelve minutes, a targeted repetition two to four minutes. Someone who does this twice a week spends about twenty minutes per week and gets further in a year than with two days of training.

Does a personal training budget work?

It works for people who were already planning to do something. For the rest, it has limited effect, because a budget still requires a decision, a choice and registration. Those are precisely the barriers where things go wrong.

What can and cannot be learned in the workplace?

Professional knowledge and certification belong in a training programme with an exam. Everything that takes place in conversations, such as explaining, confronting, negotiating or calming someone down, is better learned by doing it frequently than by hearing about it.

If you want to know whether this fits your organization, you do not need to set up a programme for it. Take one team and one conversation that regularly goes wrong, and see what happens when they spend ten minutes on it twice a week for eight weeks. On the page about our solutions you can see what this looks like technically, but the most honest answer comes from trying it yourself once. Feel free to bring the conversation your people dread the most.

Sources

• OECD, *Adult learning*, topic page with participation figures and barriers. https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/adult-learning.html
• OECD, *Education at a Glance 2025*, chapter on adult participation in education and training. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/education-at-a-glance-2025_1c0d9c79-en/full-report/to-what-extent-do-adults-participate-in-education-and-training_85e1ebf6.html
• OECD, *Trends in Adult Learning*, July 2025. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/trends-in-adult-learning_ec0624a6-en.html
• OECD, *Skills in the AI age*, OECD Artificial Intelligence Papers, July 2026. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/skills-in-the-ai-age_972bd15e-en.html
• World Economic Forum, *Future of Jobs Report 2025*, Skills Outlook chapter. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full/3-skills-outlook/