Adults learn in a different way to children and young students, they have far more complex backgrounds in terms of accumulated life experience and responsibilities.
Being aware of the following 10 characteristics of adult learners can greatly improve your effectiveness as a learning and development professional.
Let’s begin the list!
Adult learners see themselves as independent, they like to have control over and be responsible for their own learning.
Self-assessment, a peer relationship with the instructor, multiple options, and subtle approach to support are all key.
Adults learn by linking new information to prior experience to evaluate the validity of new ideas. They examine how the new information fits in with their experiences and solves their problems.
This is why it’s crucial to form a class that encourages discussion and sharing, and creates a learning community consisting of people who can profoundly interact.
Older adult learners have tons of experience, check out the 7 Considerations when teaching Older Adults.
Unless it is job related, most adult learning is voluntary and learning will be related to their career progression, professional development and job skills.
This is why it’s crucial to tap into a learner’s internal reasons with the right thought-provoking material that will question conventional wisdom and stimulate his mind. Use ARCS Motivation Model, if you are struggling to motivate your learners.
Adult learners like to learn things that will be useful to their lives in general and specifically to their career or to their self-development.
They often get frustrated with theoretical information that has no immediate use, instead preferring theory to be related to practical problems.
Adults are sometimes intimidated by formal learning situations. They may have negative attitudes towards classroom style learning, long-held prejudices and stereotypical thinking.
It may be a long time since they have taken any formal learning they may have rusty study and learning skills, poor reading skills, suffer from test anxiety and other such learning barriers.
Adults have many life responsibilities, they have things other than learning that may occupy their minds.
As the instructor, one should create a flexible program that can accommodate busy schedules and accept the fact that prior personal obligations might obstruct the learning process.
Maturity and life experiences usually lead to rigidity, which are obstacles toward learning. Adults often less open-minded and therefore more resistant to change.
A teacher should seek small change rather than transformational change. They should build in time for reflection so that adult learners can think over and absorb new information.
In most learning situations, adult learners prefer the trainer to adopt a facilitator style rather than a lecturing style. They expect the tutor to act as a role model, to be expert in the topic, to be well prepared, to practice good presentation and empathy skills.
Trainers when teaching should focus more on the process and less on the content and present material in a variety of ways to accommodate different learning styles.
Adult learners like to know the progress they are making on the learning task. They like to know what they are doing wrong so that they can learn from their mistakes.
Feedback should be accompanied with praise and encouragement.
Adult learners like to be challenged just beyond their present level of ability.
They want to be taught about things that will be useful to their work, expect to have immediate results, seek for a course that will worth their while and not be a waste of their time or money.
Conclusion
There you have it, the 10 characteristics of adult learners. Famed scholar Malcolm Knowles also wrote extensive about adult learns, in his theory of Andragogy.
Did I get all of them? Maybe I missed a few, leave a comment below with your thoughts and feedback.
I enjoy hearing from you and always take your comments into consideration.
