68% of organizations offer mentoring programs, but only 30% use stretch assignments to deliver employee skills growth. Mentorship can be a highly effective teaching tool, but it’s not enough on its own. The fastest organizations at developing their people are those that move beyond mentorship to deliver structured, measurable, on-the-job learning for employees.
This data comes from the latest report from ATD, Creating a Culture of Learning: Strategies to Nurture a Thriving Workforce, which is sponsored by Zensai. ATD found that the vast majority of organizations lack the resources to create a culture of learning. On-the-job learning closes that gap, but only with structured tracking that’s firmly tied to career progression.
The comfort zone problem
Although mentorship is the most popular option among employers, it’s not the only one. According to ATD, there are five forms of on-the-job learning and training that employers provide to varying degrees:
- Mentoring (68%)
- Job shadowing (50%)
- Peer coaching (46%)
- Rotational training (37%)
- Stretch assignments (30%)
Let’s start with why mentorships are so popular. The main reason is that they’re easy to launch. You just match mentees with willing mentors in your organization. Mentorships don’t require any major changes to how work gets done. This means decision-makers may be more willing to sign off on them than they would be for “riskier” learning and development options.
Mentorship also feels familiar due to its similarity to employee/manager 1:1s at work and lecturer meetings in higher education. So, even new hires can take to it without guidance.
By comparison, methods like rotational training or stretch assignments can require more intentional design and deeper manager involvement to run effectively. That’s why employers offer these alternatives less commonly, even in situations where they could be more effective than workplace mentorships.
These approaches are well worth it, however, as they provide opportunities for on-the-job learning that mentorship alone can’t match. For instance, job shadowing lets employees see how senior colleagues handle responsibilities that the employee in question isn’t (yet) ready for.
Similarly, stretch assignments allow employees to challenge themselves and experiment with unfamiliar tasks beyond their usual capabilities. These approaches take more investment to set up, but they’re also the methods most directly connected to career advancement, which is why the organizations that use them develop people faster. Organizations have the resources. What’s missing is the design.
Why mentoring alone doesn’t build careers
Mentoring can do a lot of good in your organization. Good mentors ground employees in their role and workplace culture, giving mentees a clearer picture of what matters and keeping new hires resilient through early learning demands.
What mentorships don’t do, however, is give an employee a chance to prove they can do the next job on their career path. That’s what really holds them back from being the ideal approach to on-the-job learning. But stretch assignments are the ideal option to combine with them.
According to onsemi’s Senior Director of Learning and Organizational Development, Mike Miller, stretch assignments “provide hands-on opportunities for employees to apply new skills, build confidence, and prepare for future roles. They help bridge the gap between learning and career advancement. At onsemi, stretch assignments are a critical component of developing talent for the next role. We set a clear expectation: employees should first master their current role, then expand their scope, acquire new skills, and demonstrate the direction they want to pursue. Once that progression is evident, they are ready to move into the next role.”
Mentorship tells you what employee growth looks like. Stretch assignments let you showcase that growth in action.
What a complete on-the-job learning framework looks like
It’s not enough just to encourage on-the-job learning. You have to design for it too. Otherwise, there won’t be a shared standard for how to proceed, which makes every option beyond mentorships harder to justify.
Every learning framework will look a little different depending on the organization it’s for. But, even so, there are three essential points to hit if you want yours to be effective:
1. Connect every learning method to a development goal
First, tie every on-the-job learning method to a development goal. This ensures that learning always has a focus tailored to the needs of the individual so they can make unambiguous progress.
Stretch assignments, for example, work best when you tie them to a specific skill gap identified through a performance conversation or employee check-in. For instance, you could task a member of your product development team who lacks AI skills with developing one of your AI agents for customer use. This would naturally connect to a development goal like gaining working proficiency in prompt design and model selection, demonstrated by building and deploying the agent within the next product sprint.
Similarly, job shadowing works best when the areas an employee shadows line up with responsibilities they’re expected to assume, and peer coaching is most effective with a specific focus rather than general, like helping an employee improve their customer service skills.
2. Give managers a way to track and assign on-the-job learning
To give managers the ability to track and assign on-the-job learning, make it so that training lives in the same environment where you set goals and track progress. The simplest way to do that is by connecting your Learning Management System (LMS) with your performance management and goal setting software.
This way, there’s no real difference between how a manager assigns a stretch project and how they assign a regular performance goal. It all happens the same way, which means development goals and on-the-job learning no longer sit in isolated spreadsheets.
3. Make learning visible across your organization
Mentoring (68%), job shadowing (50%), peer coaching (46%), rotational training (37%), and stretch assignments (30%). The organizations using all five are connecting them to one system, and that starts with making every method visible across the organization. So, what does that look like?
In practice, you can do this in exactly the same way you promote completions for formal learning programs: by marking it as a completed course in LMS reports and dashboards.
That way, senior leaders and HRDs can see which teams invest the most in hands-on development. Even more importantly, they can then see the impact this has on employee performance and retention, which go on to inform how ready someone is for promotion.
The connection between informal and on-the-job learning
Along with the five forms of on-the-job learning we’ve discussed, ATD also identified several types of informal learning that employers commonly use. 50% use lunch and learns, 49% use peer-to-peer learning, and 42% use development days, but only 33% use communities of practice.
Informal learning can be more difficult to set up and track than on-the-job training because it depends more heavily on employee initiative (especially communities of practice). It’s well worth it, however, because training on the job connects quite naturally to informal follow-up.
Stretch assignments, for instance, result in the employee gaining new knowledge or skills from their work. So, they can easily feed into employee-led presentations or workshops for peer learning. Similarly, a rotational placement can lead to a whole new community of practice as the participating employee connects people with similar responsibilities across the business.
For this to happen, however, both informal and on-the-job learning must be visible and consistently connected to development goals based on identifiable skills gaps.
Use every type of on-the-job learning to succeed
The fact that 68% of organizations use mentorships shows that they value the idea of on-the-job learning in principle. But the fact that only 30% use stretch assignments shows that most lack the framework to deliver it in practice.
For all its value, mentorship won’t be the thing that distinguishes your organization from the rest. In terms of L&D, the most successful businesses will be those that structure every method with metrics connected to career progression that’s visible to the employee and the business alike.
To learn more about improving your learning culture and how organizations approach on-the-job learning, read the full ATD report, Creating a Culture of Learning: Strategies to Nurture a Thriving Workforce.
