Adult Learning Principles 3 Catherine Mattiske

Getting Adult Learning Principles 3 Catherine Mattiske Actually Working in Your Team

Catherine Mattiske is an organisational psychologist based in Australia who has spent years studying how people actually learn in workplaces, not in classrooms. Her three principles of adult learning are deceptively simple on paper but frustrating to implement if you've never seen them break down in practice. The principles are: learning needs to be relevant and immediately applicable, learners need agency over their own development, and learning happens best in social and collaborative contexts. Most training programs get at least one of these wrong and then wonder why engagement is flat. The way I typically approach this is by mapping each principle against a concrete business problem before I design anything. Here's a practical breakdown of how each one functions and where people usually stumble. Principle one: relevance and immediate applicability. Adults disengage quickly when they can't see the link between what they're being taught and something they need to do next week. This isn't about motivation, it's about cognitive load. When a learner doesn't perceive relevance, their brain literally filters the information out as background noise. The practical test here is the Monday morning question: if someone learns this on Thursday, can they use it on Monday at work? If the answer is no, you've built the wrong program. I've seen L&D teams create elaborate multi-module courses on emotional intelligence that participants rated highly but never applied because there was no direct tie to their actual role. The fix was stripping the course back to three scenarios specific to their jobs and having them practice those scenarios in real time.

Principle two: learner agency. This is the one most organizations mess up. Adults need to feel like they have control over their learning path. Mandatory training assigned top-down triggers the same resistance mechanisms as a teenager being told what to do. The workaround I use is giving people choice within structure. Instead of assigning a single course to everyone, I create a menu of three options that all address the same competency gap and let the learner pick which one fits their context. In my experience this usually bumps completion rates from around 40 percent to 75 percent without changing the content quality at all. Agency doesn't mean no structure, it means the learner is making real choices inside the structure. Principle three: social and collaborative learning. People learn differently when they're discussing, debating, and problem-solving with others rather than consuming content passively. This sounds obvious until you look at how much corporate training is still solitary e-learning with a quiz at the end. The social element creates accountability and deeper encoding of the material. I once ran a program where I replaced individual modules with peer coaching pairs where people had to discuss a case study and apply the concept before moving on. The knowledge retention at thirty days was noticeably higher than the control group doing the same content alone. The catch is that social learning requires more coordination and can expose skill gaps between participants that some learners find uncomfortable. I should mention a specific edge case I ran into. A client wanted to roll out the three principles across a distributed team spanning three time zones with people who had very different levels of digital literacy. The social learning principle completely fell apart because synchronous collaboration wasn't feasible and the asynchronous forums were dead. What I ended up doing was creating small regional cohorts that could meet in person every other week while using a lightweight digital platform for ongoing discussion. It wasn't elegant but it worked because it respected the constraint instead of fighting it. If your people are fully remote across wide time zones, don't force social learning into discussion boards. Use structured peer review sessions or assign paired projects with clear deliverables instead.

Here's a counter-intuitive thing most people miss about these principles: they don't scale well without significant upfront investment. The relevance principle means you have to customize content for different roles, which multiplies your design workload. The agency principle means you need good self-assessment tools so people can choose appropriately. The social principle means you need facilitation capacity or at minimum well-designed collaborative templates. If you're trying to roll this out to five hundred people with a shoestring budget, you'll end up cutting corners and losing the effect. In those cases I recommend starting with one high-impact role and one competency area and proving the model before expanding. Another nuance that gets overlooked is that these principles interact with each other. If you give learners agency but the content isn't relevant to their actual work, they'll just choose confidently between options that nobody needs. If the content is relevant but there's no social component, engagement drops after the first week. You have to treat all three as interdependent, not as separate checkboxes on a training design form. The downside I want to flag honestly is that this approach is slower than traditional training. Where a standard compliance module might take two weeks to design and deliver to a large group, doing it properly with all three principles in mind usually takes six to eight weeks for the initial design and then about two weeks per cohort to facilitate effectively. If your organization needs everything yesterday, this won't work for you and you should consider a blended approach where you use traditional methods for low-stakes content and reserve the three-principle model for high-impact leadership or technical competencies.

To implement this yourself, start by auditing your current programs against each principle. For relevance, ask whether participants can name a specific task they'll do differently after the training. For agency, check whether learners have any real choice in how they engage with the material. For social learning, count how many hours of the program involve interaction with other people versus solo consumption. Most programs score zero on the third one. The redesign doesn't have to be massive, even adding structured peer discussions to an existing course usually moves the needle.