As Nigerian organisations confront growing skills gaps, the experience employees acquire through everyday work could become an important source of learning. The opportunity lies in making that knowledge available to colleagues who need it and developing a more deliberate approach to sharing expertise across the workforce.
An experienced customer service representative can sometimes recognise the cause of a complaint before the customer has finished explaining it. Years of handling difficult conversations have taught the employee when to ask another question, how to manage an escalating situation and when a problem requires attention from another department. A newly recruited colleague may understand the same procedures and still struggle to make those decisions with comparable confidence.
Much of this expertise develops through repeated practice and exposure to situations that demand professional judgement. Employees gradually learn how to recognise patterns, respond to unexpected challenges and make decisions that improve the quality of their work. Yet the extent to which others benefit from that experience often depends on informal conversations or the willingness of a colleague to provide guidance.
For organisations, this raises an important question about how knowledge is shared between employees. When valuable expertise remains concentrated among a few individuals, its contribution to wider workforce performance is limited. The organisation also becomes vulnerable to losing that knowledge when experienced employees move into different roles or leave.
Peer teaching offers a practical way to address this challenge. Through structured learning activities, employees can share the knowledge they have acquired, demonstrate effective approaches to work and help colleagues develop skills that would otherwise take considerable time to master independently.
As Nigerian businesses adapt to changing technologies and growing demands for workforce capability, the ability to turn individual experience into shared expertise could become an important part of their learning strategies.
The skills gap is also a knowledge-sharing challenge
The pressure on organisations to develop workforce capabilities is increasing. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, employers in Nigeria expect 44% of workers’ existing core skills to change by 2030. Skills shortages and difficulties attracting talent are also among the major barriers businesses anticipate as they transform their operations.
The demand for emerging capabilities is particularly evident in technology-related roles. As Nigeria develops its business process outsourcing industry and creates more digital jobs, 87% of surveyed employers expect demand for network and cybersecurity skills to increase, compared with 70% globally. Employers also anticipate growing demand for artificial intelligence, big data, systems thinking and customer service capabilities.
These developments place considerable responsibility on learning and development functions. Employees must acquire new skills as their roles evolve, while organisations need to strengthen the capabilities required to maintain operational performance.
The challenge becomes more complex when learning needs emerge across different functions and locations. A financial services organisation may need to strengthen compliance judgement among frontline employees while its risk specialists develop more advanced analytical capabilities. Manufacturing businesses face similar demands when technicians learn to operate new production systems and supervisors adapt to increasingly automated processes.
Some of these learning needs become apparent only when employees encounter unfamiliar situations. A difficult customer interaction may expose weaknesses in an agent’s understanding of a product, while the introduction of a new system can reveal challenges that were difficult to anticipate during training.
In such circumstances, colleagues who have already worked through similar problems can provide valuable guidance. Their experience helps explain how established procedures apply in practice and how employees should respond when situations become more complicated.
This creates an opportunity for organisations to draw more deliberately on the knowledge already available within their teams. Formal training remains essential for developing foundational and specialist capabilities, particularly in areas where employees need expertise that the organisation has yet to acquire. Peer teaching can extend that learning by helping employees apply new knowledge within the circumstances of their work.
The distinction is particularly relevant to capabilities that develop through experience, including communication, judgement and problem-solving. As explored in our previous article on why soft skills will determine organisational survival in the next decade, these abilities are becoming increasingly important as organisations respond to technological change and more complex business demands.
Developing them requires employees to encounter practical situations, receive feedback and learn how experienced colleagues approach difficult decisions.
What the research reveals about learning from colleagues
The benefits of peer teaching have been examined through research into how people acquire knowledge and develop professional skills. These studies offer insight into the learning process itself, including what happens when employees explain their expertise to others and how structured knowledge sharing can influence performance.
A 2014 study published in Contemporary Educational Psychology examined how preparing to teach and subsequently explaining material affected learning outcomes. Participants studied information about the Doppler effect under different conditions, including preparing for a test and preparing to teach the material to another person.
The researchers found that preparing to teach improved immediate comprehension. Participants who went on to explain the material also demonstrated stronger performance on a delayed comprehension test.
Although conducted in an educational setting, the findings offer insight into the learning experience of employees who teach colleagues. A professional who has performed a task successfully for years may rely on routines developed through practice. Explaining that task requires the person to examine the reasoning behind those routines, organise the information and consider how someone with less experience might understand it.
The process can strengthen the instructor’s grasp of the subject while making previously unspoken knowledge easier for colleagues to understand.
Evidence from working professionals adds another dimension. In a 2020 field experiment published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, researchers examined a programme that paired teachers with colleagues who had stronger capabilities in specific areas of classroom practice.
The partnerships were designed around skills identified through previous performance assessments. Teachers worked with colleagues whose strengths corresponded to areas where they needed support, giving each learning relationship a clearly defined purpose.
The experiment found that student achievement improved by 0.12 standard deviations in the classrooms of the lower-performing teachers who participated. The researchers concluded that the improvement was consistent with those teachers acquiring professional skills from their colleagues.
The design offers a useful lesson for corporate learning. When organisations understand where employees need to improve, they can connect those individuals with colleagues whose experience is directly relevant to the capability being developed.
A further study by economist Andreas Menzel examined knowledge sharing across three garment factories in Bangladesh. Selected workers were instructed to explain production processes to colleagues beginning to manufacture garments they had previously produced.
The research, published through the UK government’s research programme, found that the intervention increased the recipients’ productivity by 0.2 standard deviations during their first one or two days producing the garment.
The improvement occurred during the early stages of learning the production task, when guidance from experienced colleagues was particularly useful. Menzel also found some evidence that existing social connections influenced the benefits of knowledge sharing, while concerns about workplace status affected participation.
Taken together, these findings suggest that organisations can improve the value of peer learning by identifying specific capability gaps and creating conditions that encourage employees to share their expertise. The quality of the learning relationship matters because employees must be willing to explain their knowledge and engage with colleagues who have different levels of experience.
Where peer teaching can improve workplace performance
The practical value of peer teaching becomes clearer when organisations apply it to recurring challenges that affect employee performance.
Within contact centres and business process outsourcing operations, experienced agents often develop considerable expertise in managing difficult customer interactions. They learn how to identify underlying concerns, explain complex information and recognise when a complaint requires escalation.
Structured reviews of anonymised customer interactions could allow these employees to explain how they approach difficult cases. Colleagues would have opportunities to practise their responses and receive feedback, helping them develop the judgement required to handle similar situations independently.
For newly recruited agents, such learning can support the transition from understanding customer service procedures to applying them confidently during live interactions. Organisations can assess the results through service quality scores, escalation rates and the time employees require to reach expected levels of proficiency.
Manufacturing businesses offer another application. Experienced technicians often possess practical knowledge about equipment and operating conditions that can be difficult to capture fully in manuals. Through supervised demonstrations, they can help newer employees recognise potential problems and understand how procedures apply under changing circumstances.
The same principle extends to professional services. Consultants who have managed complex client engagements may share insights into stakeholder relationships, while experienced recruiters can help colleagues improve assessment techniques and make more informed hiring decisions.
Technology teams already use forms of peer learning through code reviews, technical demonstrations and discussions following system incidents. As artificial intelligence becomes more widely adopted, employees with practical experience using approved tools can help colleagues understand how to evaluate outputs and manage data responsibly.
These applications have something important in common. They involve knowledge that becomes valuable through use and benefits from opportunities to observe how experienced professionals make decisions.
The potential also extends across departments. A customer service team may repeatedly encounter a problem that operations colleagues understand well, while employees in finance may have developed a reporting process that other functions could adopt.
Making this expertise available requires learning and development teams to identify where relevant knowledge exists and connect employees whose experience can help one another improve.
Making peer teaching part of how the organisation works
The longer-term value of peer teaching depends on whether organisations can move knowledge beyond the employees who originally acquired it.
Experienced professionals often develop an understanding of organisational processes that extends beyond documented procedures. Their judgement is shaped by difficult assignments, operational challenges and decisions made under changing business conditions.
When these employees move into different roles or leave, successors may require considerable time to develop comparable experience.
LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report identified business strategy as the skill most vulnerable to net depletion through employee departures in its analysis of companies with substantial hiring and attrition activity. Strategic planning, sales management and project planning also featured among the affected capabilities.
These findings have implications for succession planning, particularly where critical responsibilities depend on institutional knowledge and experience accumulated over time.
A Nigerian case study illustrates how professional learning networks can help preserve and develop expertise across locations.
In a 2024 study published in Human Resources for Health, researchers examined a virtual peer mentorship group established by 16 alumni of the University of Benin College of Medical Sciences. The participants were based across three continents and brought different levels of research experience to the collaboration.
Within 18 months, the group had published two research papers, initiated a mixed-methods study and conducted training sessions on research design and implementation.
The researchers also documented challenges involving competing professional priorities and uneven participation. Their findings suggest that sustained peer learning requires a degree of structure and commitment, particularly when participants are managing demanding responsibilities.
For Nigerian organisations with distributed teams, similar arrangements could connect employees across locations and make specialised knowledge available beyond individual departments.
Building such networks begins with understanding where the organisation needs employees to perform better. Learning and development teams can then identify people who have demonstrated the relevant expertise and work with them to design learning activities around those capability gaps.
Consider a contact centre experiencing repeated escalations involving particular complaint categories. The organisation could identify experienced agents with strong quality assurance records and involve them in developing practical sessions for colleagues who need additional support.
Participants could review actual cases, practise handling difficult interactions and receive feedback as they begin applying their new capabilities. Changes in escalation frequency, resolution quality and employee proficiency would help the organisation assess the programme’s contribution to performance.
The same approach can be adapted to other functions, with learning activities designed around the work employees are expected to perform.
Managers also have an important role in sustaining these efforts. Employees who teach need time to prepare, opportunities to develop their instructional skills and recognition for the contribution they make to colleagues’ development. In regulated or safety-sensitive work, appropriate technical oversight is essential to ensure that shared knowledge meets established professional standards.
These considerations should form part of the organisation’s wider learning strategy, allowing peer teaching to develop as a reliable means of strengthening capabilities across teams.
As Nigerian businesses prepare employees for changing responsibilities, the knowledge gained through years of work will remain an important resource. Organisations that create effective ways to share that expertise can help employees develop faster, strengthen performance and retain valuable experience as their workforces evolve.
Develop a workforce that learns and performs
MacTay works with organisations to develop workforce capabilities through learning programmes designed around business priorities and employee development needs. Explore our Talent Development solutions to learn how we help organisations build the skills their people need to perform effectively and prepare for future responsibilities.
