Where have we been and where are we trying to get to?
Possibilities for the future of professional development in the vocational education and training system
Presented at Training Forum 2005 – Changing Work, Changing Workers, Changing Training, May 2005 Perth, WA
The shifts in professional development over the years have been immense – from a focus on training, to train-the-trainer and self paced learning. Then to work based learning, project driven learning, reading circles, action learning, recognition of prior learning, online learning, networks and dialogue. From the top-down expert model to the facilitated model, to peer-driven learning or the self driven, self managed, just-in-time model. At times the debate rages over whether it’s education or learning, training or facilitation, competence or capability. And of course, there is little agreement as to the name – whether it’s staff development, organisational development, professional development, human resource development, learning and development, capability development or workforce development. Just to touch the surface of some of the shifts and movements.
No matter what stance we take in all these debates, the one thing many of us agree on is that it’s the learning that’s important. And that this learning can take place in many ways – both formal and informal. During some research undertaken by the University of Technology Sydney in collaboration with TAFE NSW (2001 – 2003), the researchers delved deeply into the importance of unrecognised learning in the workplace, and observed that informal learning often blurs with formal learning. They coined the phrase everyday learning to take this into account. They witnessed the significance of the learning that often occurs through serendipitous meetings with people, discussions around the coffee pot (or water cooler!), through personal networks and trusting one's intuition. Also through making links and connections in one’s mind between experience and possibilities, and continually making adjustments to one’s actions. That ‘spaces for learning are informally created and recreated. … However it is seldom named or acknowledged as learning’ (Boud p 8).
Some organisations are becoming much more sophisticated in their approaches to learning and in the strategies they put in place to support the learning of their staff. They now incorporate coaching, mentoring, communities of practice, learning spaces, critical conversations, personal learning plans, networks, online learning - as well as a wide range of traditional activities and information through a wide range of media.
People are feeling swamped by the vast amounts of information, work expectations and compliance requirements that they need to address to stay up to date and to become more adaptable and flexible in their thinking and service provision. Let alone learning new skills and attributes for the future.
So where does all this lead us? It leads us to the need to increasingly recognise and create systems that support unpredictability, uncertainty, intuition and the breaking down of traditional silos and groupings.
Leaders are meant to put their personal needs and agendas aside and altruistically
lead us in these times of information overload, globalisation, fast technological
change and constantly changing customer demands. There are management and
change models that are forever telling us what we are doing wrong and what
we now need to do. All this for the greater good of all, taking in both individual,
community and organisational needs.
Current theories in leadership plead with us to workforce plan, empower, think strategically, innovate, improve quality, provide excellence in customer service. To move from traditional models of control and planning to transformation and change management, and more recently to risk taking and autonomy - at both senior and grass roots levels simultaneously. This view says that disturbance is necessary for healthy growth and change.
Leaders need to understand chaos and complexity, systems theory, sustainability and learning ecologies, quantum physics and self organising patterns. They need to trust and empower staff, work with integrity, measure and evaluate, and model their values ie ‘walk their talk’.
With the focus on efficiency, quality, innovation, alignment with organisational goals, priorities and customer service, the focus on personal needs and development has decreased or disappeared during the previous few decades. Some literature has emerged stressing the need to ensure that people in organisations are supported in working through their own personal issues. This aims at freeing them up as much as possible to move past personal needs for control, power and manipulation and to move to a position of knowing oneself better and to working from an increased position of strength and self esteem. This will better support them in meeting their own needs, thereby better meeting the needs of fellow workers, subordinates and customers – or so it is assumed.
For many, there is also an interest in the heart and soul of the organisation.
Literature supports holistic approaches to the organisation, stating that
the ‘whole person’ needs to come to work and that leaders need
to operate from a place of alignment with their values, beliefs, spirit and
heart.
Quite overwhelming for those who think deeply about their experiences in organizations. Many want fulfilling work environments with a purpose and outcome to their everyday work that they can relate to. People want to feel listened to, valued and acknowledged. People want their leaders to work with integrity, having a sound up to date knowledge base, wide range of experience and strong commitment to the organisation and what it stands for – and first and foremost to its people.
The backdrop to this complexity is that we have moved from the industrial, mechanistic era of command, control, predictability and efficiency, to the knowledge, ‘organic’ era of openness, chaos, responsiveness and creativity. Many people are feeling anxious in organisations and ‘being able to hold this anxiety and still function effectively is the mark of both mature people and mature organisations’ (Mark Youngblood 1997).
Increasingly, in the vocational education and training (VET) sector, people are turning to professional development as one of the key elements in supporting organisational priorities and new systems, structures, customer demands, technologies, innovation and the fast pace of change. So, how might professional development operate in this knowledge era?
In a recent research project titled ‘Working and Learning in the
Knowledge Era’, a key conclusion was that knowledge and knowing needs
to become the foundation of professional development. The traditional perceptions
of how skills are attained and applied needs to change. There needs to be
a better understanding of knowledge that clearly differentiates it from the
more mechanistic terms of information or knowledge management.
Knowledge is about how we acquire it, share it, give it our own meaning, apply it and use it to inform new actions. As stated in the research, what each VET staff member knows and shares will become increasingly central to their work and their ongoing learning. How we know and who we know is just as important as what we know.
Organisations need to build on and expand the current range of learning opportunities in VET. The research highlights that knowledge workers need opportunities for: critical conversations; to be self-motivated learners; to consciously learn by doing; to be challenged by disruptive and uncomfortable experiences that test out the learning; to be provided with periods for consolidation of learning ie having time to absorb information and integrate it into their own mental models and the actions that they take.
Historically, in all cultures, stories have been, or still are, the foundation of learning. In VET, there could well be a need to incorporate narrative as an option for our growth and development. In addition, there is also a need to have a place for ‘fun’, variety, passion and lack of rigidity.
Knowledge work is non-linear and non-routine, more intuitive, opportunistic
and networked. Is it possible for all of us to become, or learn to become,
knowledge workers? It is assumed that knowledge workers will survive and
thrive in environments of contradiction and paradoxes. Will this be so? How
do we reconcile our need to learn, change and take intuitive leaps, within
organisations that often support mediocrity and step-by-step processes of
improvement, based on measurement and incremental change?
Most of us seem to find it relatively easy to pass on our learning about new technologies and systems that we use, but not to pass on our personal learning about organisations and relationships and how to effectively and efficiently get things done, ie our tacit knowledge. Kierkegaard (in May p 141) suggests that we only learn facts and technical achievements from generation to generation; that we do not learn that which is genuinely human. Each generation has a number of similar tasks as those of generations before it. We seem to have to re-learn and experience many things for ourselves. Many at work still hold on to information as power, resentments at sharing their learning and lack of openness to new possibilities and emerging futures. The shifts for many will be difficult as they contemplate the need to become knowledge workers.
The research on Working and Learning in VET in the Knowledge Era identified eight key enablers to promote ‘knowing’ and thus embedding a new style of professional development within VET:
Enabler 1 Socio-technical system – Integrating
information and communication technology into socio-technical systems
This integrates technology-based communication with other work based communication and social practices, to promote rich work environments for knowledge workers.
Enabler 2 Networks and relationships – Foster greater understanding of the organisation from within
Greater understanding of how parts of the organization relate to each other and to the organization as a whole, and how knowledge workers within networks can unsettle ‘old’ practices and cultures.
Enabler 3 Organisational identity – Connect staff to the organisation’s fundamental identity
This enables those with knowledge about the organisation, how it works and what its needs are, to influence organisational change, development and new directions.
Enabler 4 Work outcomes and career paths – Connect
to the work and career trajectories of workers
Connecting to work outcomes and career aspirations, ensures that the professional development of knowledge workers remains relevant and enables them to have increased control over diagnosis and design of their own learning opportunities.
Enabler 5 Emergent professional development – Establish structures that integrate the use of professional development resources with knowledge work
Organisations need meaningful frameworks for professional development. However knowledge workers need these frameworks to increasingly incorporate new and creative opportunities that support them in risk taking and exploring divergent approaches and practices.
Enabler 6 Worker as designer – Provide workers with the autonomy to design their own professional development
The needs and design for professional development are often not readily predictable at the beginning of their work.
Enabler 7 Working and learning as an iterative process – Build professional development into the iterative nature of knowledge work
One informs the other as an iterative process; knowledge worker’s professional development both drives the new work needing to be generated as well as being driven by the needs of the work.
Enabler 8 Organisational environment – Create
organisational contexts that value intuitive thinking and working
Work environments that promote intuitive thinking, creative propositions, testing assumptions and risk taking, will better support the professional development of knowledge workers.
Once again, leaders will have to respond to the new and emerging needs – in this case for knowledge work in complex, uncertain and paradoxical environments, and for influencing and facilitating professional development opportunities that will support the integration of work, learning and knowing. How will leaders cope with expectations that are far more demanding than in the past?
More so than ever, leaders will have to be firmly grounded in who they are as a person and what they stand for. Organisational solutions can support, but as has always been shown in the past, cannot easily transform people and situations. Leaders themselves will have to be open to their own growth, learning and change and the painful processes of ‘letting go’. If organisations in VET need to match their learning philosophies with the experiences of their students, then leaders will also have to be seen to be learning and changing in similar ways to what they expect of their staff. There is no easy quick fix solution to all of this. Only continual hope, risk taking, humility, learning, reflection, working through consensus and having a ‘bird's eye view’ of the possibilities and options.
It may be time to move from the term ‘professional development’ which
can be seen as restrictive – to moving to a new and as yet unknown
term that is more holistic and integrates learning with working and knowing
in all its complexities, and is supported by the following assumptions about
learning:
- that learning is recognised as occurring in relationship and through mistakes
- incorporates the needs of organisational, workforce and capability development
- supports a high degree of flexibility in the organisation
- provides a wide range of learning options - formal, informal and intuitive
- responds to the shifting nature of priorities
- is available to all in the organisation, with a combined responsibility by both the individual and the organisation
- is recognised as occurring through many processes and everyday activities
- ranges from organisational learning, personal learning, on-the-job learning to learning for the future
- suits the ‘organic’, open-system nature of the knowledge era, and
- recognises the individual process that learning is.
References
BANNON John & Wilson, Graham 2002, Innovative and Imaginative Leadership, Paradox, UK
BOUD D 2003, Combining work and learning: The disturbing challenge of practice, Keynote address to the International Conference on Experimental-Community-Workbased: Researching learning outside the academy, Glasgow, Scotland, 27-29 June 2003, University of Technology, Sydney, New South Wales
CRAWFORD C B & Brungardt, Curtis L 2000, Building the Corporate Revolution: Real Empowerment through Risk Leadership Selected proceedings, 1999 Annual Meeting International Leadership Association, Academy of Leadership Press
Enhancing the Capability of VET Professionals project: Final report 2004, Australian National Training Authority, Queensland
MAY Rollo 1983, The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychology, Norton & Co, New York
Working and Learning in Vocational Education and Training in the Knowledge Era - Summary 2004, commissioned by TAFE NSW International Centre for VET Teaching and Learning (ICVET), Sydney
Working
and Learning in Vocational Education and Training in the Knowledge Era
- Final Report 2004, Australian Flexible Learning Framework,
Australian National Training Authority, Queensland
YOUNGBLOOD, Mark 1997, Leadership at the Edge of Chaos originally published in Strategy and Leadership Magazine