Work Base Learning Project

Muhammad Waqas Sadiq

•The Basis of Work Based Learning

Learning

• The UK’s Campaign for Learning defines learning as follows:

• Learning is a process of active engagement with experience. It is what people do when they want to make sense of the world. It may involve an increase in skills, knowledge or understanding, a deepening of values or the capacity to reflect. Effective learning will lead to change, development and a desire to learn more.

A CASE OF WORK BASED LEARNING

• Delia Smith is the best-selling cookery author ever in the UK, with some books of hers selling over one million copies each. She has undoubtedly influenced more people on their cooking than anyone else. She has also been a much watched TV star. So how did she learn to do this? As she comments: ‘I want to learn and I want others to learn’. Note that she is not thinking just of herself. Learning is a shared activity in her mind (and in the mind of other excellent learners who we have studied). She clearly has helped others to learn, through her TV shows and her books. But how did she learn?

Continue• Her career started with working in a restaurant kitchen washing

dishes. She took the job in order to learn how this restaurant produced such high quality food. She spent time looking at how the chefs worked, asking them questions and making notes on how dishes were cooked. She went away and read avidly about cooking, including tracking down obscure recipes in the British Library.

• As she developed her ideas she used all sorts of contacts to further her learning. For instance, she talked to people who ran speciality food shops in Soho in order to learn more about the use of particular ingredients. On top of this she experimented widely, trying out methods and techniques.

Continue

• In all this she never had any training. She learned through work based learning and the kinds of learning methods she used are ones that we will emphasize in this handbook. It is also worth noting that other great cooks/chefs have followed a similar path to Delia Smith. Keith Floyd uses all the approaches that Delia Smith used and in addition he quotes travel as a key learning mode, especially travelling in France in his early career.

Continue• According to the UK government, these people are non-

learners. They have learned through work based approaches only and they therefore don’t count as learners. Yet we can see that Delia Smith, Keith Floyd and other great chefs are brilliant learners. They are passionate about their work and learn avidly all the time through their work. Note that it is this passion and motivation that is a key. Lyn Davies, a former Olympic gold medal-winning long jumper, commented that if someone devotes four hours a day every day to practising something, they will become good at it. But of course in order to do that the person needs a high level of commitment.

U = G + P + L

• That means that you (U).• We’ll call this G for genes.• How you develop physically (P).• What you learn.

• We are either born with particular attributes or physical maturation changes us or we learn things. Since, for the time being at least, we can’t do much about G and P, the only way in which we can reasonably change for the better is through learning. There is no other process available to us.

THE CASE FOR LEARNING AT WORK• Let us first take an organization that is opposed to learning.

In this organization people would be forbidden to learn anything. When a person is recruited they would be forbidden to learn how to do the job. This would only be a slightly more extreme version of the organization that claims only to recruit those who are already competent in the job.

• Also this organization presumes that all the processes and rules in place in the organization are 100 per cent the same as those in the organization the person left – that is, no learning at all is needed.

THE CASE FOR LEARNING AT WORK

• Let’s assume that the recruited person really can do everything required in the new job. What happens when some new technology arrives? They would be told not to learn how to use it. What happens when they face a new customer? The answer presumably is ‘don’t learn about them – just treat them the same as all previous customers’.

THE CASE FOR LEARNING AT WORK• An organization that forbade learning at work is logically

impossible it could not exist. However, we now need to address the next issue. The leadership of a business could say that they don’t forbid learning but that they will not invest in it. So let’s see how this organization would fare. If we go back to the new recruit the organization would not provide any induction into the new job. They would also not allow more experienced members of staff to waste time coaching the person or even explaining any of the organization’s rules and procedures. Because, if a more experienced person were to take time out from their work to brief or coach someone, that would constitute an investment in learning. The experienced person would, for that time period, be unproductive, so there would be a real cost to the business.

THE CASE FOR LEARNING AT WORK• If a new piece of machinery were to be introduced into

the company no coaching would be provided. The leaders of the business might expect people to read a manual to learn how to use it. However, the time that the person takes to read the manual is unproductive time and constitutes a cost to the business, that is, there is a real investment in learning even if the company does not recognize it. If no manual was provided and the person was told to learn by trial and error the chances are that there would be at the very least poor productivity and most likely actual damage or safety problems.

THE CASE FOR LEARNING AT WORK

• So why do organizational leaders make critical remarks about investing in learning? The main reason seems to be that they (and many HR professionals) equate learning with training and education. Most learning that goes on in organizations has nothing to do with education or training. It is work based – as it should be. However, one major point we want to make is that the cost effectiveness of work based learning could be improved in most organizations.

Research evidence

• Author conducted a research study that involved in-depth interviews with 140 people in ten organizations in the UK. Our aim was to explore the reality of how people learned to be more effective and to progress their careers.

Research evidence• The following is a typical quote from our research. It comes from a

former secretary in the National Health Service.

• I was very lucky to work at (x) Hospital in the (y) unit where there was very much an atmosphere of, you are not just here to do typing but can get involved in what is going on, ‘If you want to help us with the research or if you want to stay late and sort out the computer, that’s great’ and I learned an awful lot there and it was that experience which motivated me to get on and make a career. I put a lot of my time into it, using weekends and evenings working on the computer database we were using for the research. I also learned an awful lot from (z) who was in the unit and let me do a lot of the administrative work that was part of her job.

Research evidence• The atmosphere of the unit was very motivating. Everybody in that unit was in

it because they wanted to develop their career and they were very motivated to get on, and this just motivated everyone else. My particular boss, I think, had the confidence in me to let me do things that she was responsible for and the fact that she let me do them increased my confidence.

• So in the unit I was seen as the person to go to first of all, especially by the nurses. My boss would tell them to see me if there were things they wanted to know. So they came straight to me, they didn’t even bother to go to her first, so my role in the unit was much more than that of a secretary, and I think I was seen as more than a secretary as well. Sometimes my boss would pass on things to me, she’d say, ‘I’ll hand all this over to you to sort out’ and I would often have to go to other people to find out information I needed to know, and then I’d get it all sorted out.

Research evidence

• It was a close unit. Although I was a junior I sat with the senior staff in the coffee room and joined in their conversations. They would talk about things in front of me and they obviously trusted it wouldn’t go any further. The job I’d had before had been as secretary in a laboratory in another place and there it was just a matter of putting in the allotted hours. I got very bored, very quickly. There was no motivation at all and I left after six months. I need a challenge. If I stop learning, then I’m not going to be motivated, and that means I couldn’t be doing my job very well.

Research evidence

• Woodall (1999) carried out extensive research on HR professionals to explore their attitudes to and perceptions of work based learning for managers. She quotes that they saw the following challenges as definitely developmental.

• High profile responsibility• Developing new directions• Unfamiliar responsibilities

Research evidence

• We would agree with this, from our research. However she went on to quote challenges that were seen as ‘definitely not developmental’ These were:

• Handling adverse business conditions.• Dealing with a lack of top management support.• Dealing with a lack of peer support.• Handling a difficult boss.

•What do you THINK??

Research evidence• What is interesting is that these are the perceptions of HR

professionals. Our research explored how people did learn in reality. And we had examples where the supposed ‘not developmental’ challenges did prove developmental for some people. For instance, one interviewee mentioned that she had had a very difficult, authoritarian boss. He would, for instance, demand material for a Monday morning on a Friday afternoon. She said that, while this was unpleasant at the time (and not the way she would ideally have liked to learn new things), the pressure from her boss did actually make her learn. Because she would have been in trouble if she had not delivered, it pushed her to develop more than she might have done.

Planned versus opportunistic learning

• The research we conducted confirms that of others in the field (for example, Woodall, 1999; Burgoyne and Reynolds, 1997; Eraut, 1998), in that most work based learning is opportunistic and unplanned. People learn from things as they happen. However, many organizations have used more planned and structured approaches. We found, for instance, that there was a growth in planned mentoring schemes in some of the organizations that we studied.

Planned versus opportunistic learning

• Other organizations had planned assignments to provide developmental experience for particular individuals. One reason for this handbook is to promote the more explicit use of organized and thought through learning processes in work. It’s clear that the learning from day-to-day activity will just get on and happen.

• However, it’s also clear that many organizations are missing the opportunity to maximize learning from work contexts. For instance, we have found that people were sent on time management courses which did little good, when the organization had people who were excellent at time management and who could coach others to be more effective. Coaching is just one of the many methods that we will mention later. We could have also suggested other approaches to meet this need. What we want to promote is the notion that the first option that needs considering, when looking at a development issue, usually ought to be inside the organization.

Modifying training• Reynolds (2002) makes a neat distinction between what he labels the

‘traditional approach’ and a ‘business-focused approach’ to training. An example shows the distinction he makes.

• He postulates how the two approaches would deal with a specific topic:

• Customer care:

• Traditional:• Lecture people on why customer care is important. Do a few role plays.

• Business-focused:• Give people a phone and a list of customers. Have them ring up real

customers to find out what they want and how that compares to what they get. Have people ring up real customers with real complaints and resolve them. Bring in a real customer into the training room and have people find out what he or she wants.

Transfer of learning• The simplest definition of transfer is ‘the degree to which behaviour

will be repeated in a new situation’ (Detterman, 1993, p. 4). Transfer of learning is therefore a key issue. One reason for supporting work based learning is that, properly carried out, it can often make the problem almost redundant. If you have a work problem and you learn to solve it there is no transfer of learning involved: you have learned precisely what you need in the situation in which you work.

• The major transfer problem lies in the education and training world. In this context people go away from their work, learn things on a course and then have the issue of transferring this learning to real situations back at work.

KINDS OF TRANSFER• Much of the literature (and common parlance in organizations) assumes

that transfer is all one process. However, it can be useful to separate out a number of aspects. First, we can distinguish between near transfer and far transfer.

• Near transfer: Is where the learning is close to the job requirements. So learning to use particular software on a PC at someone else’s desk may transfer to you using the same software and hardware a your desk. This is near transfer.

• Far transfer: Would be where you learned to speak German and this helped you to learn Japanese. Both are languages but they are quite dissimilar and if learning one helped you to learn the other it would be a case of far transfer.

THE ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT FOR TRANSFER

• We have so far only looked at transfer as an individual activity. And we have only mentioned barriers to transfer at this level. However, there is much evidence that there are wider social factors to pay attention to. For instance, a classic paper by Fleishman (1953) showed that supervisors could attend a one week course on how to be better at dealing with their staff.

• The course trained supervisors to be more people-oriented. And from day one back at work it seemed that the key lessons had effectively transferred to the work context. Supervisors were more people-oriented. However, when the researchers went back some months later the supervisors had mostly reverted to their previous behavior.

• The reasons for this were simple. The managers of the supervisors wanted them to behave as they had before the course.

Challenges

• We also know that other factors in the work context can affect the transfer of learning. Some factors that we identified in our research as barriers to transfer in work

• contexts include:

Challenges• The person’s manager;• The general culture of the organization – for example, one where people are

discouraged from trying something new;• Technology, for example, less than user-friendly computer software;• Resources, for example, there is no money to try out a new way of working;• Markets – they are not ready for a new approach;• The work team – peers can be a bigger influence than the manager in

blocking new learning;• Professional barriers, for example, a nurse learning a new approach that the

consultant will not let her use because of assumed professional roles;• Fear of feeling foolish, for example, where a person learns a new technique

but fears the response of others.

Summary• Work based learning is essential an organization cannot survive unless people continuously learn at

work.

• Learning is not all one process there are different kinds of learning.

• Just learning at work does not guarantee that it will be effective, there are ways of maximizing the value of work based learning.

• Education and training have a minor role to play in supporting learning for work – the role is enhanced if learners can drive what is provided on courses.

• Learner self management enhances effective learning.

• The transfer of learning across contexts is important but not always easy.

• The organizational context may support or hinder work based learning (but it can’t totally prevent it).