It’s Learning at Work Week (18-24 May 2026), and the theme this year is ‘many ways to learn’.
Learning is an important factor in helping us thrive at work. In 2005, Gretchen Spreitzer led a study which developed the Theory of Thriving, a psychological state which comes when we experience both a sense of energy and learning at work.
Yet, all too often, I come across organisations and teams who are stuck when it comes to learning. They’re surviving, not thriving. This is primarily because “the training budget has been cut”. But all it takes is some creativity, imagination, and effort and you can put in place lots of different low or no-cost ways to learn. In other words, learning and development is more than attending a training course!
Here are 18 no and low-cost ways to help you learn:
No-cost ways to learn
Read free articles and blog posts. There are so many brilliant websites out there with access to free articles. My website, for example, has 200 articles covering all aspects of management, leadership, and the psychology of work.
Write blog posts. As well as reading blog posts and articles, why not write them to help embed your learning. For example, I recently delivered a masterclass on wellbeing and resilience for LG Comms and one of the participants is writing a blog post about what they learned from the session.
Read books from your local library. Books can be expensive, particularly non-fiction books. Why not join your local library to access thousands of books, including audio books.
Sign up for free webinars. Every day I see experts promoting free webinars on platforms such as LinkedIn. And most professional membership bodies offer webinars to members. For example, I’m a member of The British Psychological Society and some of the webinars I get to attend for free because I’m a member.
Keep a notebook to record things you learn. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, was an exceptional learner. His secret? He kept a notebook which he called ‘Notebook of things I don’t know about’. This is something I now do. Every time I come across something that I’m curious to know more about, it goes in my notebook and then I’ll read, listen, or watch things to learn more.
Watch YouTube tutorials. There are some amazing YouTube accounts out there for pretty much everything. I’m currently learning to crochet and I’m following a couple of fantastic accounts which are taking me step-by-step from being a beginner.
Listen to podcasts. There are podcasts covering a huge array of topics. I love podcasts and you’ll always find me listening to one and then sharing my thoughts on LinkedIn (sharing our learning is a great way to anchor the learning). My current favourites are The Curiosity Shop (Brene Brown and Adam Grant), All in the Mind (Claudia Hammond), IdeaCast (Harvard Business Review), How to be a better human (TED), and Blanchard LeaderChat. You might also be interested in my podcast, Manage with Confidence, which is for people managers and those who develop people managers.
Peer-to-peer coaching. If your company can’t afford to hire a coach, why not have a mutual coaching arrangement with a trusted colleague? This is something I did when I was in a senior management role. I’d meet with one of my peers for a coffee once a month and we’d coach each other on work-related issues.
Mentoring. Ask someone more senior than you, inside or outside of your company, if they will be your mentor. Be clear on what you want from the relationship, however, so as not to waste your time or theirs. Here’s a short article to help you get the most out of mentoring. You can also be a mentor to someone else. I’ve found being a mentor, I learn just as much as hopefully my mentee does.
Design and run a workshop or webinar on a topic of interest to you. The main cost here is your time. As Brene Brown says in her book, Dare to Lead, “Integrating and teaching others is the best way to embed learning from a book” (p.209). This is something I encouraged when I led several different teams. Not only does this help embed the learning for the person delivering the session, but it’s also a way to share the learning with the rest of the team. This is particularly important if there was only enough money for one person to attend a conference or seminar, for example.
Job shadowing. Identify someone whose job interests you and ask them if you can shadow them for the day. I’d encourage you to make notes, or write up, what you learned about the job. When I was a service head in local government, I often used to have people ask to shadow me and I always said yes. At the end of the job shadowing day, I’d have a chat with the person to ask them what surprised them about my job, what didn’t surprise them, and one key thing they took away from the day.
Job swaps. I used to love swapping jobs with other heads of service in the local authority I worked in. It’s a great way to not only learn about other areas but develop a bit more empathy and understanding about the pressures your peers are under. You’ll get new ideas for your own service, too, as well as identify opportunities for better collaboration between services.
Team meetings. I think these are an untapped resource. In my experience, too many of them are simply about checking of actions. A verbalised to-do list. Some of the best managers I’ve worked with, dedicate a portion of the agenda to learning. This might be getting someone from a different team to share a useful practice or tool, or one of the team sharing an update of something new they’ve learned recently.
Reflective practice. I am passionate about reflective practice. It has a range of benefits including helping us to be more resilient, manage our emotions, improve our performance and become better leaders. All you need is a notebook, a pen, and some time. I always suggest to clients to start off setting a timer for just 5 minutes, once a week. Most end up going beyond that as they get into the flow. Here’s an article I wrote with different questions and approaches to try out.
Low-cost ways to learn
Group coaching. One-to-one coaching can be expensive and only available to a handful of people in an organisation. But group coaching makes the power of coaching much more accessible to more people. The thing I love about group coaching is it also helps build a collaborative network between groups of managers, which will continue often long after the final group coaching session. Here’s some information, if you’re interested in learning more about my group coaching offer.
Action learning sets. This approach was developed by Reg Revans who said, “There can be no learning without action, and no action without learning.” Action learning tends to be geared towards managers with the aim of helping them to learn from each other’s best practice, develop supportive structures, build managers’ confidence, and introduce new ways of working. A few years ago, I taught a group of in-house HR, OD and L&D consultants in a public sector organisation how to facilitate action learning sets. This meant they didn’t then need to keep paying me to facilitate the action learning sets and could run them between themselves. Action learning has now become one of the key forms of learning in that organisation.
Set up a book club. The cost here is time and maybe a kitty to get some tea and biscuits. A few managers and HR/OD consultants I’ve worked with have set up book clubs. They choose a non-fiction book relevant to a common interest, such as management or psychology, and meet once a month to discuss the book and key learnings.
Journal club. This is an approach used in academia and in the NHS. It’s something I introduced when I ran the occupational psychology doctoral programme, at Birkbeck. The group would meet once a month, with someone taking a turn in sharing and talking us through a journal article that was important to their work. We’d discuss and examine the strengths and weaknesses of the article, and how we might use the learning from the research for our own respective practices. Why not try a version of this with your team, or a group of other managers? You don’t have to use scientific research articles. You could use articles from your professional trade publications. The main cost here is the magazine or journal the article came in.
Post author: Dr Hayley Lewis. First published on the HALO Psychology website 18 May 2026.
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STUDIES REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE