Take people on Twitter (and all four of us are). I see all this excitement about 140 characters being the road–or the transporter–to the promised land of real collaboration. Then I listened yesterday to tweets from inside a federal government social media conference. Most of the in-person attendees had never used Twitter (some grumbled that people reading tweets hadn’t paid for the conference).

I did a little digging and came up with a comparison. Number of people on Twitter: around 5 million. Number of households in the U.S. that have pet birds: around 12 million.

Tweet, tweet.

So: lots of people in the training field are, and have always been, stand-up instructors focused on very specific content using very traditional approaches. Probably the next biggest batch is the people cranking out that instruction (sometimes there’s a big overlap). And the vendors whose livelihoods depend on feeding that particular elephant.

And the employers, by and large, like it that way, or at least accept it — because by definition half of all employers are below average. The organization’s leadership, when it thinks about this at all, leans to the dosage view of training: so many exposure hours, so many bits in the LMS bucket, so many sign-offs that you’ve taken X.

Unless you’re a Tom Peters for whom starting at the bottom means talking to the chief operating officer, if your vision of job-related learning and performance is wider than the organization’s, you need to build alliances with the people who control budgets. If “informal learning” as a term doesn’t fly (as it won’t, in many places), then call it OJT or individual learning or training 2.0.