Situational Learning: The Smart Way to Learn Today

The way we learn at work is ever evolving. Programs, courses, workshops, and certifications are still part of the mix, and they’re just as valuable today as they’ve always been. But they’re not without limitations. It’s time to go beyond them and add something that helps us learn and find solutions faster, in a more manageable and flexible way, more aligned with our ever so precious time.

Learning at the speed of action

If you’ve ever worked in tech, this will feel familiar. Developers have been learning this way for years. Sure, they get degrees, take courses and participate in workshops. But when something breaks or a new tool needs figuring out, they don’t wait for the next training. They Google it. They GPT it. They experiment until they find what works. It’s learning in the moment—because that’s when it’s needed, not later.

So why should that kind of learning be limited to resolving technical problems?

Think about soft skills. How to give feedback, handle conflict, lead a meeting. These aren’t things you learn once and store away for later. They show up in the middle of your day, often unexpectedly. And if you don’t handle them well, the consequences can snowball.

All Learning starts with an event or situation

To support this kind of learning, our tools need to adapt. Traditional platforms are built around categories, skill sets and tags. Great for cataloguing, organizing resources, not so great if are looking for something actionable today, now.

What if systems could cut through these abstractions and respond to easily relatable situations. Starting with what’s actually happening and then deliver what helps us learn to overcome that exact challenge?

Instead of forcing us to break down our experiences into learning topics predefined by someone —labels buried in a catalog of thousands of resources, only to be overwhelmed by choices. We could simply say:

“A colleague and I argue too much whenever we share our opinions. It's frustrating.”

Any learning system should respond appropriately with this simple user input. Displaying not a laundry list of irrelevant results, but with relevant learning resources encompassing a number of topics and skills: communication, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, leadership. Resources made by human experts for humans resolving human situations.

With the Situational Learning approach:

• We start with something that has happened or is happening, that we need to deal with;
• We make progress with every experience, not just course by course;
• We take action now, not “sometime during the next quarterly training”;
• Events are always occurring.

Then once and awhile we sum up our experiences and decide what subjects we need to diver deeper: maybe take that 8 week Leadership Program in Oxford?

When learning happens in the flow, it sticks. We don’t just learn, we act on it and get immediate feedback. And that’s what drives faster growth and immediate gratification.

The support for this kind of learning workflow for anything but software engineering has been missing from the digital learning landscape for far too long. It’s time to change that—not just for developers, but for anyone who works with others, makes decisions, and navigates the everyday complexity of human interaction and the pressure to perform.

In other words, all of us. Because our time is precious and we’re not machines.

And now, it’s here with Learninghubz. We’re excited to help shape what comes next.

Thank you for reading.
Nuno