Giving Informal Learning the Recognition it Deserves

Commissioned by the OECD Centre for Skills, with support from the governments of Flanders (Belgium), Luxembourg and the Netherlands, this project set out to address a long-standing gap in skills policy: informal learning. The skills people pick up through everyday life, at work, through social interaction, and via self-directed learning has never been consistently defined or measured, despite being one of the most important and accessible channels for building skills in a fast-changing, AI-driven economy.

Work Advance supported the OECD team through the recommendations and reporting phases of the project. Our role centred on developing the project's policy recommendations, including a proposed shared definition of informal learning, a typology of its different forms, and options for improving how it is measured. We helped design and deliver an international virtual workshop and a series of expert meetings, bringing together stakeholders from across the three partner countries and beyond to test and refine this thinking. 

The resulting report, published by OECD Publishing in the OECD Skills Studies series, proposes a comprehensive, shared definition of informal learning and a more coherent measurement framework, and sets out ten actionable recommendations to help countries build a stronger evidence base and embed informal learning more systematically within their lifelong learning and skills policies.