The number everyone gets wrong in 70:20:10

The 70:20:10 learning model has had an interesting career in corporate life. It appears in L&D strategy documents as a call to invest in coaching, mentoring, and on-the-job development. It also appears, with some regularity, in budget conversations as evidence that formal training represents only a modest slice of how people actually learn, and might therefore not need quite as much money spent on it. Both of these uses are common. One of them is based on a misreading of what the numbers actually say.

Where the model came from

The framework originated in research conducted by Morgan McCall, Michael Lombardo, and Robert Eichinger at the Center for Creative Leadership in the 1980s. They were interested in what actually shaped the development of successful senior executives, and they asked around 200 of them to reflect on the experiences that had been most formative in their careers. The result was a rough breakdown: approximately 70% of development came from challenging on-the-job experiences, 20% from working with and observing others, and 10% from formal training and reading. Lombardo and Eichinger published these figures in their 1996 book The Career Architect Development Planner, and the model has been in wide circulation in L&D circles ever since.

It is worth pausing briefly on the methodology. The data was self-reported, drawn from a relatively small sample of executives who were asked to recall formative experiences retrospectively. The researchers themselves intended it as a directional rule of thumb, not a formula to be applied mechanically across all organisations, all roles, and all types of learning. Some skills require considerably more than 10% formal instruction before they can be applied at all safely; others lend themselves more readily to learning by doing from the outset. The model is useful precisely because it prompts a broader conversation about how learning actually works. It becomes considerably less useful when treated as a budget calculator.

The number that gets misread

The 10% is the figure most frequently cited in budget discussions, usually in the form of "the research shows that only 10% of learning comes from formal training." This is technically accurate. What is almost never mentioned alongside it is what that 10% represents in terms of time.

The average employee spends approximately 1% of their working life in formal training activities. One per cent. Against that backdrop, formal training accounting for 10% of total learning is not a modest contribution; it is a remarkable one. As the team at BiteSize Learning put it, this ratio "represents proportions of 'stuff learned', not the clock time spent in each mode" — and getting an entire 10% of learning from a channel that consumes only 1% of working time "demonstrates how comparatively efficient and impactful it can be."

That is a ten-to-one return on time invested. If anything, it is an argument for more formal training, not less, or at minimum for being very deliberate about the quality of the training that does get commissioned. Using 70:20:10 as a justification for cutting the training budget is roughly equivalent to reading a report on the returns from exercise and concluding that because people spend relatively little of their week at the gym, the gym is probably not worth going to.

What the 70 and 20 actually need

There is a second misreading embedded in how the model is sometimes applied, which is to treat the three elements as independent of one another. They are not. The 70% of on-the-job learning does not self-organise into something coherent. Without a conceptual framework, experience is just experience: sometimes instructive, often ambiguous, occasionally forming habits that would be better unformed. The 20% of social learning, through coaching, feedback, and observing others, is similarly dependent on there being something shared to anchor the conversation around.

Formal training, done well, provides that anchor. In agile and SAFe environments this is particularly visible. A team that has been through a Leading SAFe programme together has a shared vocabulary for things that would otherwise take months to negotiate through accumulated misunderstanding. A sprint retrospective, a PI planning session, a portfolio conversation: these run differently when everyone in the room has the same mental model of what they are trying to achieve. The training is not separate from the daily work; it is the thing that makes the daily work legible, and the on-the-job learning coherent.

One of our trainers made this point to a sceptical L&D director some time ago. She had just been through a round of training budget cuts, justified partly by reference to 70:20:10, and was wondering whether the remaining spend was going to be sufficient to make any difference. The answer is that the question is almost the wrong one. The relevant question is not how little formal training the organisation can manage with, but how to make the formal training it does invest in reverberate effectively through the other ninety per cent.

The budget conversation this model is actually useful for

Used properly, 70:20:10 is not an argument about where to cut; it is a prompt to think about where the leverage is. If formal training accounts for a disproportionate share of learning relative to the time invested in it, the implication is that the quality and relevance of that training matters enormously. A course that leaves participants with a clear framework and some genuine insight will ripple through their day-to-day work in ways that are hard to measure but real. One that delivers a certification and not much else will not, and no amount of on-the-job follow-through will compensate for it.

The model is also useful for pushing L&D functions to think about whether they are actively supporting the other 90%. Most organisations do reasonably well at commissioning formal training. Fewer are systematic about ensuring that managers have development conversations after it, that stretch assignments are used to consolidate what was learned, or that there is any deliberate mechanism for turning individual training investment into shared organisational capability. These are genuine gaps, and 70:20:10 identifies them usefully. They are just not gaps that can be addressed by spending less on the 10%.

A note on the model's limitations

In the interest of balance: the proportions in 70:20:10 will not hold for every context. Learning to fly a plane is not 70% on the job from the outset; learning to use a new piece of software probably leans harder on informal exploration than formal instruction. The model was derived from a specific sample of senior executives reflecting on career-level development, which is a rather different question from how a graduate learns to write code or how a Scrum Master develops their facilitation instincts. There are other frameworks, including the 3E model (Experience, Exposure, Education), that offer alternative cuts on the same territory.

None of this undermines the core point. Whatever the precise proportions in your organisation, formal training is not a marginal input. It is a catalyst. The question worth asking is not whether 10% is worth investing in, but whether the 10% you are investing in is good enough to do the job it needs to do.

If that is the conversation your L&D function is having at the moment, we are happy to contribute to it.