journey learning meaning

The Importance of a Learning Journey

The pursuit of knowledge has the power to transform us. A learning journey nurtures this curiosity of transformation in the learners. It offers continued learning and ensures continued growth. It uses tools that can also help learners navigate the terrain to keep learners going. One can use a it to discover what to learn, how to learn, and what they are good at. Once they understand this, they can easily use the tools and techniques provided by a learning journey to improve their knowledge.

Table of Contents

What is a learning journey, why is a learning journey important, how do you create a learning journey, how to implement it, benefits of the learning journey, infographic, knowledge check , frequently asked questions (faqs), what is the learning journey, what is an employee learning journey.

The term learning journey refers to a planned learning experience that takes place over time and includes various learning aspects and experiences using multiple techniques and platforms. Instructional designers create a learning journey to identify the appropriate format and methodology of learning. A well-structured learning journey can help the learners to achieve the objectives effectively, ensure learning implementation, and initiate actual behavioral change .

It caters to the leadership style, culture, specific needs of any organization , and the preferences of the learner’s leadership level. It also shows a more straightforward path to the learners’ learning goals, demonstrating a starting point and structured progress to help them achieve the objectives effectively. Organizations take the help of a learning journey to navigate their employees into a well-structured training process.

Organizations that employ a mixed learning journey are 2.5 times more likely to be financially successful than those that use more conventional learning approaches. (Source: DDI, Global Leadership Forecast).

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Learners find the structure provided by the learning journey very helpful. It clarifies what people should do next and how much time they should set aside. It offers a high level of flexibility around where and when they should study, together with the multiple modes and channels for learning, which help embed essential skills rapidly and effectively.

The knowledge, study, and research abilities that learners bring to the learning process make up their learning journey. Since instructors are involved in designing and evaluating their education, it also offers a structural method to the learners and the instructors who are shaping the module. Instructional designers create a well-aligned learning module using a it.

In order to create a successful learning journey that is well-aligned with the organization, instructional designers try to:

• Bring attention to the prospects for learning:  The goal can only be achievable when the learners understand why this learning is essential. Only then can the organizations promote a healthy learning environment .
• Describe the benefits for the employees: Adult learners are encouraged intrinsically with self-esteem, desire for a better quality of life, self-development, and recognition. Therefore, instructors must plan a well-aligned learning journey according to that.
• Use gamification , virtual and augmented reality, scenario-based learning, and branching scenarios like immersive formal learning. The effectiveness of immersive learning has been demonstrated, with assignments finished on schedule. As a result, compared to other conventional learning approaches , this style of education has a higher likelihood of producing successful results. Immersive learners always develop more extraordinary cognitive abilities than traditional learners. They exhibit better problem-solving skills, better memory, and higher attention control.
• Provide employees with access to information during work so, they know what they need when needed.
• Support formal events with performance support tools.
• Reinforce learning by providing opportunities for practice, follow-up tools, and constructive criticism.
• Offer social learning so learners can interact with those who are also learning and advancing while exchanging information and experiences. As adult learners, they are instrumental in their learning process. They are more proactive in doing the work needed to facilitate learning and drive the learning process based on what they think they have to succeed on the job . Learners bring a greater volume, quality of experience, and rich resources to one another.

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Instructional designers can implement it like this:

• First, they should assess the employees’ current skill levels based on the organization’s competency model. Finding and concentrating on the essential leadership skill gaps is the first step in a precise diagnosis.
• Then, learning should be applied and tested through computer-based business simulations customized to the organization’s specific needs. Simulation exercises ensure that concepts learned during the learning event apply to the organization’s real-world issues.
• Next, they can use follow-up tools to support continuing learning with additional content, case studies , and community leader boards to encourage the new learners. It utilizes several measurement techniques to quantify the effectiveness of the talent development program.

It has the following advantages:

• It helps the learners to navigate appropriately. It helps them to gain knowledge independently.
• A well-aligned learning journey brings additional structure to a learning system. It provides a structured environment that helps to maintain discipline in the learning process.
• It enables self-paced learning for the learners. It generates an individualized experience. It helps learners undertake the courses at their own pace, according to their needs. It gives the learners freedom in their choices.
• It makes it easier to define and pursue goals. It generates an achievable goal for the learners and motivates them to achieve it.
• It helps accelerate the learning and development goals of the employees as well as of the organizations.
• It saves admin time.
• It promotes a continuous feedback method that reevaluates the purpose of the journey.
• It makes learning a continuous process, a journey indeed.
• It offers to learn in small chunks. Small amounts are better for retention. It allows learners to remember and relearn the materials at their convenience.

Learning Journey

• To allow learners a competitive edge.
• To provide structured learning experience.
• To offer creativity.
• To make feedback more immediate.
• Finding and concentrating on the essential skill gaps in the organization.
• Communicating with the employees/stakeholders.
• Imposing a general training and development journey.

With the help of a learning journey, one can evaluate a learner’s progress, clarifying what they should accomplish next and how much time they should allot for it. Learners’ ability to self-evaluate their learning progress makes the learning process independent. Employee learning journeys consist of a number of distinct learning experiences that are spread out over time, utilizing various methods and delivery modalities and leading to the acquisition of new knowledge, skills, or behavioral changes at the end of the journey.

The term learning journey refers to a planned learning experience that takes place over time and includes various learning aspects and experiences using multiple techniques and platforms.

In order to create a successful learning journey that is well-aligned with the organization, instructional designers always keep the end goal in mind, recognize the gaps, extend learning over development-related activities, involve the learners to direct management, calculate the effects, and plan for flawless execution.

With the help of learning journeys, one can evaluate a learner’s progress, clarifying what they should accomplish next and how much time they should allot for it.

Employee learning journeys consist of a number of distinct learning experiences that are spread out over time, utilizing various methods and delivery modalities and leading to the acquisition of new knowledge, skills, or behavioral changes at the end of the journey.

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The four phases of a successful learner journey

This whole concept is very much “on trend” in the corporate world. Variants range from “independent booking”, when staff plan out their own learning route, to “Silicon Valley safaris”, when participants can take a look at the latest forms of collaboration and innovation processes at start-ups. As this range shows, there are very different views in organizations about what a journey of this kind should actually look like. This is even demonstrated by the fact that, in general, the terms “learner journey” and “learning journey” are used synonymously – just like they are in this text. After all, however vivid the journey metaphor may be, each organization will approach and organize it differently in practice.

What is a learning journey?

In an era of rapid knowledge cycles, high pressure on productivity and diversified work structures, education processes that are not integrated into the actual work and take place at a separate time are rarely successful. Occasional, isolated training sessions are not, on their own, enough to enable learners to progress and acquire knowledge and new capabilities such as the much-invoked “future skills” in an agile, direct way during their actual work. Learners therefore need to be part of both a personalized and a social process. This opens up a new perspective on not only education itself, but also on tools and formats.

There are three key features:

• The focus is not on compressing content into a single workshop, a traditional training course or a digital study module. Instead, digital options linked together in a way that makes good educational sense support employees for as long as it takes for them to internalize the new knowledge and build up the relevant skills to the point that they can apply them correctly in their everyday jobs.
• As the approach is designed from the student’s perspective, learners can choose the route and activities that meet their personal needs, progress at their own speed and reach their destination independently.
• It is not a sequence of activities in the sense of a prescribed linear route within a learning management system. Instead, it describes all activities and methods that employees use to access, assimilate and, ultimately, apply a particular topic, including adding their own experiences (e.g. expectations and concerns) into the mix, interacting with colleagues and sharing their knowledge with others.

Reflecting on experiences, learning from them and applying new knowledge in a practical setting all takes time – weeks, months or even years in some cases.

Where does a learning journey start – and where does it end?

It starts with the first contact with the topic and extends through the initial learning phase and everyday application in the working context until such time as the learner has mastered the subject and can themselves play a part in consolidating and further developing the topic or the options on offer.

The concept therefore extends far beyond the formal training. The underlying idea of the process is based on the 70:20:10 principle devised by Morgan McCall, Robert W. Eichinger and Michael Lombardo back in the 1980s. To put it in very simplified terms, according to this concept, people only acquire around 10 percent of their skills through traditional methods such as seminars, eLearning or books. The bulk of knowledge acquisition – some 90 percent or so – takes place outside the traditional context, e.g. through interaction with others.

As we observe in practice time and again, the risk of failure increases if the process comes to an end before this discussion phase has taken place. If, for example, organizations roll out a collaboration tool such as Microsoft 365 and focus exclusively on how the tool is used, key aspects will be omitted, such as the important phase of collective social learning and negotiations over how the tool should be used in the everyday working context to improve collaboration. As a result, employees receive training on specific principles, but no consideration is given to the elementary phase of collaborative work. This means countless teams are created, overwhelming staff and resulting in a sense of confusion and frustration that the project isn’t taking off.

How do I develop a successful learning journey?

Tts learner journey template.

To be successful, the journey has to encompass more than just the initial phase of knowledge acquisition – it also involves the starting point, the application in the everyday employment context and the consolidation of what has been learned through sharing, advocacy and continuous improvement. That’s because, of the four phases in total, it is only in these last two that the sustainable practical transfer of knowledge takes place – and this process is vital for subsequent value creation in the organization.

However, before we start designing the four key phases in our capacity as an HR manager or learning academy, we first need to undertake the pre-planning stage. The following points need to be clarified:

• Who are the students? A journey is always developed from the target group’s perspective (learner personas). Materials and methods are chosen to meet individual learning needs, with an increasing focus on the learning experience, i.e. personalized educational environments and experiences.
• What do students need? Before an education program can be devised, a comprehensive assessment to identify the target group’s needs and requirements is vital. This assessment takes the form of interviews and, where appropriate, an initial assessment of the realities of the work experience.
• What is the aim? Which of the organization’s strategic or performance targets need to be supported? The more clearly the educational targets and context of the target groups are defined, the more effectively a mix of formats (e.g. blended learning) and methods that mesh together and make good educational sense can be put together.

It is clear from the points outlined above that the development of learner personas is a key success factor, since very different routes will be required for different target groups.

Four key phases of the learning journey – these are what matter

It’s now a case of fleshing out the four phases in detail. In our example, we want to drive forward digital transformation and use Microsoft 365 to make it easier for sales staff at an organization to collaborate with each other.

1. Starting point

In what context do the students first come across the topic that they will be dealing with on their learner journey? Although this may be a chance encounter, such as via the office grapevine or an informal recommendation from a colleague, it is generally in the organization’s interests to specifically design the introduction to the topic, incorporating the knowledge that has been acquired by working out the personas. How is the topic relevant to students? How should students come into contact with it? To what extent do they benefit from engaging with the topic?

This phase lays the foundation for the learning experience and the subsequent learner journey experience, so particularly close attention needs to be paid to it.

2. Initial study phase

During this phase, the focus is on the “traditional” building up of knowledge and skills. It’s all about fundamental questions such as: What goals are being pursued with the change? What is the underlying idea? How do I use the tools? How do I create a team? How do we want to make use of the new options for our future collaboration? A carefully curated mix of formats is chosen for the initial stage. This may involve devising blended learning concepts that combine online sessions, workshops, virtual classrooms, study groups or learning nuggets, for example. This phase is traditionally very much the central point of focus. Participants find out what they ought to be able to do. All the essential foundations are laid for the subsequent application phase.

3. Application phase

In this phase, the focus is no longer on acquiring knowledge and skills, but instead on applying them on a daily basis and providing direct support in the workplace. If, for example, an employee needs to make use of a seldom-used feature of Microsoft 365 on a one-off basis, nobody wants to have to work through an entire course. Instead, what the user needs in these circumstances is quick, straightforward answers to their questions. The important thing is to provide the user with exactly the kind of efficient support they’re looking for in their moment of need. There are various suitable forms, such as performance support (e.g. step-by-step instructions), communities or social learning programs that help users help themselves.  Organizations often neglect this phase – with the result that the tool isn’t used effectively and the expected benefits in terms of productivity and efficiency are not realized.

4. Consolidation phase

The focus in this phase is on interaction with colleagues, e.g. in a community, since this helps drive forward and improve the topic. In our specific example, experienced sales staff in a “community of practice” could work on building up knowledge management based on Microsoft 365 and transferring the insights gained through this process to the learner journey for future users. When this phase is reached, participants can themselves act as mentors, helping colleagues progress or supporting them during the onboarding process by means of user-generated content, for instance. This phase is considered the icing on the cake, since not all participants will achieve the level of expertise required for this or demonstrate the necessary commitment.

The role of HR as the “travel agent”

Even though the four phases have been set out chronologically here, this does not mean that learners actually work through them in this order. It is perfectly possible to jump between the different phases at will – the only reason for breaking the process down into the various phases is to provide guidance for structuring the learning journey. Even in phase 4, for example, it may be necessary to return to phase 2 if a new technical function becomes relevant as part of the digital transformation.

As HR managers and learning professionals, we need to ask ourselves the following fundamental question: What does our “travel agent” role in this context look like? Not all factors that contribute to the process can be planned. It is therefore important to give employees access to all the formats and options they may need – including remotely. When making the arrangements, we need to include plenty of embarkation and disembarkation points to ensure users have the option of skipping certain material. After all, focusing exclusively on the initial building up of knowledge to the extent that the whole process comes to an abrupt halt after the end of phase 2 would be a terrible waste of potential.

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How to Create Effective Learning Journeys that Drive Employee Performance

May 11, 2021 | By Asha Pandey

True learning and the subsequent changes in professional behavior require a learning journey that enhances professional development and leads to improved performance. In this article, I explore the connection between learning journeys and their impact on employee performance.

What Is a Learning Journey?

A learning journey is a comprehensive, continuous process of acquiring knowledge and skills, designed to facilitate long-term behavior change and professional development. Unlike traditional training, which is often a one-time event, a learning journey encompasses a series of interconnected learning experiences. These experiences combine formal training, like structured classes and webinars, with informal learning opportunities initiated either by Learning and Development (L&D) teams or individuals themselves. This approach ensures that learning is not just an isolated event but an ongoing process that integrates new knowledge and behaviors into daily work practices, leading to enhanced employee performance. Formal training serves as a foundational element within this learning ecosystem, while the incorporation of informal training elements personalizes and enriches the learning journey.

Key Characteristics of a Learning Journey:

• Structured and Ongoing: A learning journey is not a one-time event; instead, it’s a continuous process that unfolds over time, allowing individuals to evolve and adapt to new knowledge and skills. Integral to this process is the role of mentor feedback, which provides learners with essential insights and guidance, helping to refine skills and align learning objectives with real-world applications. This mentorship aspect enriches the learning journey, making it more personalized and effective.
• Customized Learning Experiences: It comprises personalized content and a variety of delivery methods tailored to meet the unique needs and goals of individuals or teams.
• Formal and Informal Components: It combines formal training programs with informal learning opportunities , creating a holistic approach that caters to different learning preferences.
• Behavioral Focus: The primary goal is to induce positive behavioral changes, leading to improved employee performance and alignment with organizational objectives.

What is the Difference Between Traditional Training and Learning Journeys?

The key differences between traditional training and learning journeys can be summarized as follows:

Format and Structure:

• Traditional Training: Often one-time, event-based sessions.
• Learning Journeys: Continuous, multi-step processes.

Learning Approach:

• Traditional Training: Typically focuses on immediate skill acquisition.
• Learning Journeys: Emphasizes long-term development and application.

Customization:

• Traditional Training: Generally one-size-fits-all.
• Learning Journeys: Tailored to individual learning styles and needs.

Engagement and Interaction:

• Traditional Training: Can be more passive in nature.
• Learning Journeys: Encourages active participation and engagement.

Outcome and Impact :

• Traditional Training: Aimed at knowledge transfer.
• Learning Journeys: Focuses on behavioral change and performance improvement.

Why Should You Invest in Learning Journeys?

In North America’s animal kingdom, the coyote has demonstrated exceptional learning abilities, thriving in various environments. When Meriwether Lewis in the early 19th century first encountered a coyote on his famous exploration, he was perhaps the first of European descent to see one. He attempted to kill and collect it as a new specimen. He and his men were unsuccessful though – an experience that thousands of American hunters have shared since. The coyote has learned to adapt and thrive to constant changes in their ecosystem and are now a common sighting in large cities like San Francisco (California) and Salt Lake City (Utah).

In business, those who can learn are the coyotes – they can adapt and thrive to changing circumstances. Companies should find and develop coyotes in their organizations – employees who actively participate in their own learning journeys and contribute to the journey of their coworkers.

Benefits of Learning Journeys from a Business Perspective:

• Customization for Strategic Alignment: Learning journeys offer highly customized programs designed to align with an organization’s key goals and objectives. They are structured to address specific enterprise challenges and opportunities, ensuring that the learning journey directly supports the business’s strategic direction.
• Future-Proofing the Business: By structuring learning journeys around key enterprise goals, organizations are better prepared to face future challenges. This proactive approach drives both incremental and disruptive innovation, allowing businesses to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing landscape.
• Improved Employee Engagement: Organizations that value learning and encourage professional development through learning journeys experience heightened employee engagement. Employees are more motivated and committed when they feel their growth is supported and recognized.

Benefits of Learning Journeys from an Employee’s Perspective:

• Guidance for Skill Enhancement: Learning journeys serve as a GPS for individual learners, guiding them through the process of skill acquisition and proficiency development. They offer a clear path through formal and informal learning, helping employees enhance their skills and expertise.
• Motivation and Awareness: Learning journeys provide motivation and awareness, inspiring individuals to take charge of their own development. They create a sense of purpose and direction, encouraging learners to proactively seek knowledge and growth opportunities.
• Learning Consumption and Application: These structured journeys guide learners through the stages of learning consumption and knowledge application, ensuring that the acquired skills and knowledge are put into practice effectively.
• Relevance to Career Aspirations: Learning journeys are highly relevant to individuals, assisting them in achieving their career aspirations. Whether it’s mastering a specific role or acquiring expertise in a particular technological domain, these journeys support individual growth and development.

Learning journeys offer a dual advantage, benefiting both the organization and its employees. They align learning and development with business goals, promoting innovation and engagement. From the employee’s perspective, learning journeys provide a clear path for skill enhancement, motivation, and relevance to career aspirations, ultimately driving continuous improvement and professional development.

Drawbacks of Learning Journeys

While learning journeys offer a comprehensive approach to professional development, they are not without their challenges. Here are some potential drawbacks:

Resource Intensive:

• Designing a learning journey requires significant time and resources. This includes the creation of tailored content, monitoring progress, and providing ongoing support and feedback.

Can Overwhelm Learners:

• The extensive nature of learning journeys may overwhelm some individuals, particularly if the content is dense or the pace is too fast.

Requires High Commitment:

• To be effective, learning journeys demand a high level of commitment and self-motivation from learners, which can be challenging to maintain over longer periods.

Potential for Inconsistency:

• In a diverse learning environment, ensuring a consistent experience for all learners can be difficult, especially if the journey involves various instructors or methods.

Dependence on Technology:

• Learning journeys often rely on digital platforms and tools, which can be a barrier for learners with limited access to technology or those who are less tech-savvy.

Evaluation Challenges:

• Measuring the effectiveness of a learning journey can be complex, as it involves evaluating progress over an extended period and across various learning formats.

Why Do Learning Journeys Work

Learning journeys function as a structured approach to professional and personal development. Here’s how they typically work:

• Initial Assessment : Identifying individual learner needs and goals.
• Customized Learning Path : Designing a personalized learning plan based on the initial assessment.
• Diverse Learning Methods : Incorporating various formats like online modules, workshops, and real-world assignments.
• Ongoing Support : Providing mentorship, peer interaction, and resources throughout the journey.
• Continuous Feedback : Regular assessments and feedback to track progress and adjust the learning path.
• Real-world Application : Opportunities for applying learned skills in practical settings.
• Reflection and Adaptation : Encouraging learners to reflect on their progress and adapt their learning strategies.

This process ensures that learning is an ongoing, evolving journey tailored to each individual’s needs and goals, leading to effective skill development and personal growth.

How to Create an Effective Learning Journey?

The following are vital issues to consider when building learning journeys:

• Consider the overarching vision, acknowledging that the future, though uncertain, is always present. Learning occurs over prolonged time and should never been something that employees stop doing, nor should organizations ever rest on their previous laurels. Integrating spaced learning and repetition into this process is crucial, as it greatly contributes to better knowledge retention, allowing learners to revisit and reinforce concepts at regular intervals, thereby solidifying their understanding and application in practical scenarios.
• Awareness: Before employees can begin a learning journey, they need to be aware of what is available, how the organization will support them, and what lies ahead.
• Motivation: While some employees are motivated for the pure sake of learning, some are looking for additional extrinsic motivations. Organizations should set up systems to reward progression in the learning process, encouraging employees to begin and continue the learning journey.
• Participation and experimentation: Throughout the learning journey, employees need a safe space to participate, digest, apply, and experiment with the new knowledge they’re gaining through the learning journey. The experimentation and feedback loop are key to achieving behavior change.
• On-going connects: Design learning journeys that include more than formal training events. Develop guides for managers to follow-up with employees on what they learned, implement social and mobile learning strategies, and allow employees to direct much of their own informal learning.

What are the Key Components of a Learning Journey?

A well-structured learning journey comprises several key components that work in tandem to ensure effective and engaging education experiences. These components are critical in shaping a comprehensive learning path that caters to diverse learning styles and objectives.

Needs Analysis and Goal Setting:

• Identifying specific learning needs and objectives.
• Setting clear, measurable goals for the learning journey.

Varied Learning Formats:

• Incorporation of diverse learning methods such as online courses, workshops, and practical exercises.
• Blending formal with informal learning opportunities.

Personalization and Flexibility:

• Tailoring content to meet individual learner’s needs and preferences.
• Offering flexible learning paths that accommodate different learning paces.

Continuous Assessment and Feedback:

• Regular evaluations to track progress.
• Providing timely feedback to guide and improve learning.

Application and Reinforcement:

• Opportunities to apply learned skills in real-world scenarios.
• Reinforcement activities to ensure retention and integration of new knowledge.

Support and Resources:

• Access to necessary learning materials and resources.
• Support from instructors, mentors, or peer groups.

These components collectively ensure that a learning journey is not only comprehensive but also adaptable, engaging, and result-oriented.

What Are Key Aspects that Would Help You Create Effective Learning Journeys?

Leverage the following aspects when developing learning journeys:

• Start with the end in mind : Planning is too often abbreviated in the L&D field, a reaction to develop content as quickly as possible to please business stakeholders. Remember what Albert Einstein said about planning: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
• Include all stakeholders:  During the initiation phase, include key stakeholders and ensure that everyone involved in the process has the information they need. Leaders should ask themselves the following questions: What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?
• Build awareness of the solution with the target audience : Begin with primers to help them understand the big picture of the learning journey. Include an exposition on the current state, the desired future state, and the differences between those two states. Use microlearning hits that get to the point quickly.
• Stimulate prior knowledge with which learners can scaffold new information.
• Present content in the most appropriate modality.
• Model learning strategies to help students assimilate new information.
• Include as much application and practice as possible with healthy feedback loops.
• Assess performance, giving additional feedback to learners.
• Once learners are back on the job, use informal learning and coaching nudges to reinforce the application of new knowledge on the job. Employ performance support systems so learners can quickly find and share information they need in the flow of work.
• Reward behavior change : While punitive rewards may be effective in the short term, for effective long-term behavior change, learning journeys should offer employees as much purpose, autonomy, and mastery as possible. Once employees are paid a fair and competitive wage, purpose, autonomy, and mastery are more effective methods of motivation than even bonus models.

Making It Work – EI’s Learning and Performance Ecosystem Based Approach to Create Effective Learning Journeys

EI has developed a highly effective model for creating effective learning journeys in a Learning and Performance Ecosystem . It’s a cyclical model that includes the following:

• Capture attention about learning opportunities.
• Explain what employees will gain from the learning journey (what’s in it for me).
• Leverage immersive formal learning events that employ gamification, virtual and augmented reality, scenario based learning, and branching scenarios.
• Support formal events with performance support tools, giving employees access to information in the flow of work : exactly what they need, when they need it.
• Reinforce learning after formal events with safe places to practice and receive feedback on their performance.
• Provide social learning so that learners can collaborate with others progressing in the learning journey, sharing knowledge and experiences.

Learning Journey Example: Sales Training

In our sales training program, we use the Learning and Performance Ecosystem framework to structure an effective learning journey for our team. Here’s how it aligns with the framework:

● Capture Attention : We kick off the learning journey by capturing the attention of our sales team about the upcoming training. This may include email announcements, intranet notifications, and engaging teasers to generate excitement.

● Explain the Benefits : We clearly communicate what participants will gain from the training journey. This includes improved sales skills, increased sales performance, and the potential for enhanced career growth.

● Immersive Formal Learning Events : We leverage immersive formal learning events that employ various cutting-edge techniques, such as gamification, virtual and augmented reality, scenario-based learning, and branching scenarios. These events make the learning experience engaging and memorable.

● Performance Support Tools : We provide performance support tools to our sales team, offering quick access to information in the flow of work. They can access product details, sales scripts, and negotiation tips exactly when needed.

● Reinforcement and Practice : After formal training events, we create safe spaces for our sales team to practice and receive feedback on their performance. This may involve role-playing exercises, simulated sales calls, and peer evaluations.

● Social Learning : We encourage social learning, allowing learners to collaborate with colleagues who are progressing in the training journey. They can share knowledge, experiences, and best practices, fostering a sense of community and continuous improvement.

This sales training learning journey not only equips our sales team with the necessary skills and knowledge but also keeps them engaged and motivated throughout the process. By aligning with the Learning and Performance Ecosystem framework, we ensure a comprehensive and effective approach to sales training that yields tangible results and benefits for both our team and the organization.

Parting Thoughts

Effective behavior change occurs over time as desired competencies and behaviors are reinforced through a blend of formal and informal training. Learning is not a one-time event. Professionals seek mastery of their trade, striving for autonomy and purpose. Learning journeys, thoughtfully developed and shared with employees, are an effective method of facilitating behavior change that aligns to enterprise goals and initiatives.

I hope this article provides the requisite insights on how you can use our unique Learning and Performance Ecosystem to create effective learning journeys and boost employee performance.

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Create a Learning Journey for Leaders

LEARNING JOURNEY

What Is a Learning Journey?

A learning journey is a strategic approach to developing groups of leaders over time. It’s based on the principle that true behavior change takes time, and that people learn best together—as long as they can personalize their experience.

At DDI, we create learning journeys to maximize the time and effectiveness of leadership development . Learning journeys offer the right blend of personalized learning with group connection. For example, leaders can take assessments, pursue online learning, and coaching to boost their knowledge and insight. But they cement learning when they come together in virtual or in-person classroom sessions.

Ready to get started? We offer proven, competency-based learning journeys you can implement right away. Or we can work with you to create a completely custom learning journey, just for you. Either way, we’re ready to start walking by your side as your leaders begin their transformation.

Compared to Companies That Use More Traditional Learning Methods, Companies That Use a Blended Learning Journey Are:

more likely to be financially successful

more likely to have a highly-rated development program

more likely to have a strong leadership bench

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A one-and-done or an eight-hour-long Zoom session wasn’t going to cut it. That’s why we moved to the concept of a learning journey that included content delivered in shorter sprints, but delivered over a period of time

— Joe Ilvento, Chief Learning Officer at Commvault

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A learning journey to help leaders build morale and engagement to retain talent.

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Take your leaders on a learning journey to create a coaching culture that boosts performance.

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This learning journey will help leaders practice inclusion to create a welcoming, supportive environment for all.

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With a DDI Leadership Development Subscription, you get a dedicated strategic learning team who will work with you to create a custom program, just for your leaders.

We start by understanding the business goals you need to accomplish. From there, we’ll work by your side to curate the perfect blend of content to ensure your leaders will gain the right skills. Then we’ll tailor learning formats that will best fit your culture and your leaders’ needs.

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Want to Take Things Virtual?

At DDI, we’re big believers in the power of learning together. But that doesn't mean it has to be in-person.

As many companies have shifted to a virtual workplace, we’ve taken leadership development with it. We offer learning journeys that take place entirely in the virtual world.

But that doesn’t mean you miss out on human connection. Our virtual classroom format creates the same bond leaders get in the classroom – just without handshakes.

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Don’t Forget Microlearning

The key to creating successful learning journeys is to sustain learning in between classroom sessions. And that’s where microlearning comes in.

Microlearning offers quick learning experiences that help leaders practice and deepen their skills between larger learning sessions. It can be things like short courses, videos, self-assessments, online tools, or other quick formats.

In just a few minutes, microlearning offers a quick boost to keep your leaders engaged.

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DDI’s Ultimate Guide to Leadership Development gives HR pros everything they need to create and launch powerful leadership development experiences.

Ultimate Guide to Leadership Development

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• Identifying the key lessons and outcomes at a detailed level
• Determining what blend of each EPIC component would best serve which aspects of the programme. An example of some questions you can ask at this stage are:
• How important is it to practice this skill in a real-world environment? Are there opportunities for stretch assignments or special projects to enhance the skill/behaviour? (E) 
• Do people need to work together to come up with solutions? How important is immediate feedback? Are there subject matter experts who can offer some guidance? (P) 
• Does the content need to be accessed at the point of need? Would providing videos, tip sheets, etc. be useful or not likely accessed? (I)
• Does working in a group enhance the learning? Is practice in a ‘safe’ environment important? (C) 
• Planning at a high level the order in which each intervention should occur
• Ensuring that there is a good balance of each approach – and not defaulting to classroom type learning!

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Learning Journeys

The world is complex and uncertain. To survive and thrive you need to develop your ability to adapt the way you learn (your Learning Power). You can use  Learning Journeys  to discover how you learn and, what you are good at. Once you understand this, you can use the tools and techniques provided by Learning Journeys to improve your Learning Power.  

Welcome to the UTS Learning Journeys website!

This exciting resource has been created to help students and staff at all levels to reflect on our readiness for new challenges.

Why the big focus on preparing for change? Because that’s basically the only thing we can be sure the future holds — we will run increasingly into situations that require us to step out of our comfort zones.

As a student these might be in your university studies, jobs, internships or co-curricular activities, while Staff will be reflecting on the challenges of their professional roles.

You have a lifetime of learning-on-the-job ahead of you, most likely mixed with formal training or education, as you pivot and prep yourself for new roles and projects.

We need new ways of thinking, and new ways of working with others. All the evidence is that this requires new levels of self-awareness and personal reflection, and this is what the Learning Journeys tool is designed to help with.

It asks you to honestly assess how you handle challenging learning, and gives you instant feedback to reflect on, called your Learning Power profile. This isn’t a grade, and you don’t have to show this to anyone else if you don’t want to. It’s a mirror to reflect on, to see if it helps you see yourself in a new way.

The Learning Power profile introduces a language for learning and over a decade’s educational research shows that many people at all ages and stages of life have found this helpful.

So, this website explains what a Learning Journey offers you, and shares stories of how students and staff are already using it here at UTS.

Our experience shows that it’s important that you take a bit of time to understand how to get the most out of it before diving in.

Once you’re ready, then you can click through to the tool, sign in, and embark on your Learning Journey!

What is Learning Power?

How do Learning Journeys work?

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The Power of Learning Journeys for Leadership Development

Published on: February 2017

Written by: Rommin Adl

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I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.

It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”

Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.

We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?

To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”

For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.

This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.

To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.

The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.

After the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions , in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.

As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.

As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .

Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.

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True learning and implied behavior change requires a learning journey to boost professional development and achieve improved performance. In this article, we look at the link between learning journeys and how it can improve employee performance.

True learning and implied behavior change requires a learning journey to boost professional development and achieve improved performance. In this article, I look at the link between learning journeys and how it can improve employee performance.

What Is a Learning Journey?

Traditional training has often been viewed as a one-time event:  a  training class,  a  webinar,  a  learning module.

However, if the goal of training is a change in behavior, which leads to improved employee performance, training should, instead, be viewed as a learning journey – a series of learning events made up of a blend of formal and informal interventions, nudges, and follow-ups that ingrain new knowledge and behavior in employees.

• Formal training is one of the key elements of a learning ecosystem that typically facilitates the learning acquisition.
• As you add informal training (some initiated by L&D teams, some initiated by individuals and coached by leaders), you create a learning journey.

Why Should You Invest in Learning Journeys?

Learning is the key to thriving business.

In the animal kingdom of North America, the coyote has perhaps proven to be the most apt at learning and has therefore thrived. When Meriwether Lewis in the early 19 th  century first encountered a coyote on his famous exploration, he was perhaps the first of European descent to see one. He attempted to kill and collect it as a new specimen. He and his men were unsuccessful though – an experience that thousands of American hunters have shared since. The coyote has learned to adapt and thrive to constant changes in their ecosystem and are now a common sighting in large cities like San Francisco (California) and Salt Lake City (Utah).

In business, those who can learn are the coyotes – they can adapt and thrive to changing circumstances. Companies should find and develop coyotes in their organizations – employees who actively participate in their own learning journeys and contribute to the journey of their coworkers.

From a business perspective , learning journeys provide highly customized programs that are structured around key enterprise goals and objectives. Leaders should provide this insight to help prepare their organization for future challenges.

Not only does this help futureproof their business by driving incremental and disruptive innovation but it also improves employee engagement. Employees are looking for organizations that value learning and encourage professional development.

Organizations benefit from employees who continuously strive for improvement.

From the employee’s perspective , the learning journey acts as a GPS that guides learners in their efforts, through formal and informal learning, to perfect their art by acquiring new skills and proficiencies in business domains and technological mastery. These GPSs guide learners through motivation, awareness, learning consumption, and knowledge application.

Learning journeys comprise formal and informal learning – opportunities to acquire skills for a specific role or technological domain. They are highly relevant to the individual, assisting him/her with his/her career aspirations.

What Do You Need to Consider While Creating an Effective Learning Journey?

The following are vital issues to consider when building learning journeys:

• Look at the  big picture  and consider that, while foggy, the future is ever present. Learning occurs over prolonged time and should never been something that employees stop doing, nor should organizations ever rest on their previous laurels.
• Awareness : Before employees can begin a learning journey, they need to be aware of what is available, how the organization will support them, and what lies ahead.
• Motivation : While some employees are motivated for the pure sake of learning, some are looking for additional extrinsic motivations. Organizations should set up systems to reward progression in the learning process, encouraging employees to begin and continue the learning journey.
• Participation and experimentation : Throughout the learning journey, employees need a safe space to participate, digest, apply, and experiment with the new knowledge they’re gaining through the learning journey. The experimentation and feedback loop are key to achieving behavior change.
• On-going connects:  Design learning journeys that include more than formal training events. Develop guides for managers to follow-up with employees on what they learned, implement social and mobile learning strategies, and allow employees to direct much of their own informal learning.

What Are Key Aspects that Would Help You Create Effective Learning Journeys?

Leverage the following aspects when developing learning journeys:

• Start with the end in mind : Planning is too often abbreviated in the L&D field, a reaction to develop content as quickly as possible to please business stakeholders. Remember what Albert Einstein said about planning: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
• Include all stakeholders:  During the initiation phase, include key stakeholders and ensure that everyone involved in the process has the information they need. Leaders should ask themselves the following questions: What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?
• Build awareness of the solution with the target audience : Begin with primers to help them understand the big picture of the learning journey. Include an exposition on the current state, the desired future state, and the differences between those two states. Use microlearning hits that get to the point quickly.
• Stimulate prior knowledge with which learners can scaffold new information.
• Present content in the most appropriate modality.
• Model learning strategies to help students assimilate new information.
• Include as much application and practice as possible with healthy feedback loops.
• Assess performance, giving additional feedback to learners.
• Once learners are back on the job, use informal learning and coaching nudges to reinforce the application of new knowledge on the job. Employ performance support systems so learners can quickly find and share information they need in the flow of work.
• Reward behavior change : While punitive rewards may be effective in the short term, for effective long-term behavior change, learning journeys should offer employees as much purpose, autonomy, and mastery as possible. Once employees are paid a fair and competitive wage, purpose, autonomy, and mastery are more effective methods of motivation than even bonus models.

Making It Work – EI Design’s Learning and Performance Ecosystem Based Approach to Create Effective Learning Journeys

EI Design has developed a highly effective model for creating effective learning journeys in a Learning and Performance Ecosystem. It’s a cyclical model that includes the following:

• Capture  attention  about learning opportunities.
• Explain what employees will gain from the learning journey ( what’s in it for me ).
• Leverage  immersive  formal learning events that employ gamification, virtual and augmented reality, scenario based learning, and branching scenarios.
• Support formal events with  performance support tools , giving employees access to information in the flow of work: exactly what they need, when they need it.
• Reinforce learning after formal events with safe places to  practice  and receive  feedback  on their performance.
• Provide  social learning  so that learners can collaborate with others progressing in the learning journey, sharing knowledge and experiences.

Parting Thoughts

Effective behavior change occurs over time as desired competencies and behaviors are reinforced through a blend of formal and informal training. Learning is not a onetime event. Professionals seek mastery of their trade, striving for autonomy and purpose. Learning journeys, thoughtfully developed and shared with employees, are an effective method of facilitating behavior change that aligns to enterprise goals and initiatives.

I hope this article provides the requisite insights on how you can use our unique Learning and Performance Ecosystem to create effective learning journeys and boost employee performance.

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Learning journey: Conceptualising “change over time” as a dimension of workplace learning

• Original Paper
• Published: 07 May 2022
• Volume 68 , pages 81–100, ( 2022 )

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• Adeline Yuen Sze GOH   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4263-5712 1  

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Understanding how individuals learn at work throughout their lives is significant for discussions of lifelong learning in the current era where changes can be unpredictable and frequent, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite a corpus of literature on the subject of “learning”, there is little research or theoretical understanding of “change over time” as a dimension of individual learning at work. Increasing emphasis has been put on individuals’ personal development, since they play key mediating roles in organisations’ work practices. This article proposes the concept of the “learning journey” to explore the relational complexity of how individuals learn at different workplace settings across their working lives. In order to illuminate this, the article draws on the learning experiences of two workers with different roles at two points in time across different workplaces. The author argues that individual learning involves a complex interaction of individual positions, identities and agency towards learning. This complexity is relational and interrelated with the workplace learning culture, which is why learning is different for individuals in different workplaces and even for the same person in the same workplace when occupying different roles.

Itinéraire d’apprentissage : conceptualisation du « changement au fil du temps » en tant que dimension de l’apprentissage sur le lieu de travail – Comprendre comment les individus apprennent au fil de l’existence en milieu professionnel est important pour nourrir les débats sur l’apprentissage tout au long de la vie à l’époque actuelle où les changements peuvent être imprévisibles et fréquents comme l’illustre la pandémie de COVID-19. Malgré le corpus de littérature existant sur « l’apprentissage », peu de recherches ou de connaissances théoriques portent sur le « changement au fil du temps » en tant que dimension de l’apprentissage individuel sur le lieu de travail. On accorde de plus en plus d’importance au développement personnel des individus étant donné qu’ils assument des rôles de médiation essentiels dans les pratiques professionnelles des entreprises. Cet article présente le concept de « l’itinéraire d’apprentissage » pour examiner la complexité relationnelle de la façon dont les individus apprennent dans différents cadres professionnels tout au long de leur vie active. Pour éclairer ce propos, l’article s’appuie sur l’expérience éducative de deux salariés avec des rôles différents, à deux moments différents, sur des lieux de travail différents. L’autrice affirme que l’apprentissage individuel inclut une interaction complexe entre les points de vue, les identités et l’action personnels en matière d’apprentissage. Cette complexité est d’ordre relationnel et liée à la culture de l’apprentissage sur le lieu de travail, ce qui explique la raison pour laquelle apprendre diffère pour les individus en fonction du lieu de travail, et que même pour une seule et même personne apprendre sur son lieu de travail diffère en fonction des postes qu’elle occupe.

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Learning in and Through Work: Positioning the Individual

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Learning in Response to Workplace Change

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Introduction

In today’s precarious global market economy, many countries are under increasing pressure to remain competitive and productive. The impetus to be competitive usually results in changes in work organisation, work structures and the labour market. Many countries promote lifelong workplace learning and encourage innovation as necessary strategies to address these changes (Yorozu 2017 ). Although a corpus of theoretical accounts of learning exists, there has been limited theorisation or discussion of what lifelong workplace learning might entail, especially in this period of uncertainty and disruption, when career progression is less linear than in earlier times (Akkermans et al. 2020 ; Arthur et al. 1999 ).

Drawing on data from a group of in-service vocational teacher trainees enrolled in a one-year training programme run by a local university in Brunei, this article proposes the concept of a “learning journey” to advance our thinking about change over time as a dimension of workplace learning. The article follows a conventional sequence, beginning with a review of the different theoretical perspectives about learning for work to illustrate the hitherto limited emphasis on lifelong workplace learning. This literature review is followed by the research methodology. Two case stories are presented to contextualise the findings, with a discussion considering the interrelationship of individual positions, identity and agency which deepens our understanding of learning throughout working life. The article concludes by underscoring the concept of a “learning journey” to conceptualise the change-over-time dimension of workplace learning as part of individual lifelong learning and the implications of this concept for advancing our thinking on the topic.

Learning for work and lifelong learning

Most countries’ policies and standard practices take an approach to learning for work that focuses on the early stages of a career. For example, initial teacher training and/or teaching practices precede employment as teachers; new doctors need to undergo a period of internship training before entering the profession; and apprentices learn on the job. Once able to perform satisfactorily, they are employed in the job. On a similar note, mature students returning to work are assumed to have completed the necessary training prior to (re-)entering the labour market. This front-loaded model of workplace learning, as the name implies, assumes that all the essential training needed for a lifetime of practice has been completed once the training programme is complete.

There are fundamental issues with the front-loaded model of training for work, which appears poorly aligned with the reality of today’s rapidly changing workplaces. First, proponents of this model tend to assume that initial training for a job will suffice for a lifetime of work practice. Hence, training is usually a one-off event. Second, it is assumed that a given job will last for a substantive part of a person’s life, or that people will stay in one role or job for the whole of their working lives. However, the reality of today’s uncertain economic climate is that changes in work demands, work practices and occupational structures are frequent and unpredictable. This stands in opposition to the front-loaded model, which assumes that the nature of work remains fundamentally unchanged.

Given this gap between models of initial education and the changing realities of work, we need to re-conceptualise workplace learning. Learning for work is no longer a one-off event; rather, it is a lifelong process where the workplace itself is one of the essential sites of learning. This also entails the processes of identity construction and transformation (Van Dellen and Cohen-Scali 2015 ; Filliettaz 2013 , Billett and Somerville 2004 ). Early studies focused on how workers develop their expertise through their ongoing experiences of work. For example, Chris Agyris and Donald Schön ( 1974 , 1978 ) write about how workers reflect on their own work experience to adapt to changing circumstances. Schön ( 1983 , 1987 ) goes on to immortalise the notion of the “reflective practitioner”, focusing on how workers consciously or unconsciously correct their practice in order to develop their expertise. Other writers like Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus ( 1986 ) focus on how workers develop their expertise through ongoing experience at work. Hubert Dreyfus ( 2001 ) later extended this work to emphasise the salient role of informal experiential learning. Victoria Marsick and Karen Watkins’ ( 1990 ) notions of informal learning and incidental learning also contribute to theorising workplace learning. Psychological theories have strongly influenced this body of research.

Following this early thinking, there was a shift of focus from workers themselves to the nature of work practices within the workplace, through which workers learn. This shift is evident in the range of socio-cultural and postmodern theories found in the workplace learning literature. Situated cognition theories (Brown et al. 1989 ), socio-cultural theories like those of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger ( 1991 ), and cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström 1987 , 2001 ) focus on the nature of work practices, which often overlook the individual workers within the workplace. The lack of emphasis on individual workers is a limitation of such theories, which largely draw upon the participation metaphor (Sfard 1998 ) whereby the history, agency and dispositions of individual workers are subsumed within the workplace context. Attempting to reintegrate individuals into social participatory processes, writers like Phil Hodkinson and Heather Hodkinson ( 2004 ) draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ), which views individuals as reciprocal parts of the social contexts in which they learn.

From a different perspective, Stephen Billett and Margarita Pavlova ( 2005 ) highlight how individual subjectivity and agency can help us understand individual engagement and learning through workplace practices. Billett ( 2011 ) argues that some accounts of learning place too much emphasis on social influences. He proposes that individual subjectivity, intentionality and identity are socially shaped over time. These roles contribute to individuals’ cognitive experience and subsequently influence their conceptions of what is later experienced. As Lave succinctly puts it:

There are enormous differences in what and how learners come to shape (or be shaped into) their identities with respect to different practices. … Researchers would have to explore each practice to understand what is being learned, and how (Lave 1996 , pp. 161–162).

This claim signals that it is important not just to study workplace practices, but also to understand how individual positions, dispositions and actions influence the way workers learn through participation in various practices throughout their working life – in other words, change over time. Theories such as Lave and Wenger’s communities of practice and Engeström’s activity theory struggle to provide a well-developed structure for understanding change over time as a dimension of workplace learning. They focus mostly on the learning itself, which takes either a timeless or a thin temporal slice of individual experience rather than a longitudinal perspective, and seldom explores or captures individual changes.

A few longitudinal studies focus on individual learning over a period of time. Martin Bloomer and Phil Hodkinson explored young learners’ dispositions to learning changes over a period of time through engagement in formal education. Based on this study, they developed the concept of “learning careers”, defined as “the development of dispositions to learning over time” (Bloomer and Hodkinson 2000 , p. 590). The concept of “learning careers” continues to be helpful for examining learners’ identities and dispositions for learning in various settings (e.g. Gallacher et al. 2002 ; Crossan et al. 2003 ; and Ecclestone and Pryor 2003 ). Whilst this concept may have currency in understanding changes in learners’ dispositions, it has been revisited by Hodkinson and his colleagues.

Three broad theoretical perspectives underpin the “learning careers” concept. First, the word “career” is used to refer to “any social strand of any person’s course through life” (Goffman 1968 , p. 119), where the strand involves learning. This assumption has been challenged by Phil Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) on the grounds that learning cannot be separable from other aspects of a person’s life, since most learning by an individual has many informal attributes. Second, learning is integral within social practices in any given situation (Lave and Wenger 1991 ), which contradicts the first perspective. It follows that the concept of “learning careers” does not refer to a separate isolated process within the given “location”. Finally, Hodkinson and colleagues draw on Bourdieu’s notion of “dispositions”, which depicts orientations and attitudes towards learning.

In extending the limitations of the concept of “learning careers”, Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) propose the use of “learning lives” rather than “learning careers”. The “learning lives” project aimed to understand the complexities of learning over an individual’s life course (Biesta et al. 2011 ). In agreement with Billett ( 2001 , 2011 ), Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) argue that it is equally important to understand the longitudinal dimension of an individual’s workplace learning within the broader context of their life. They emphasise people’s “learning lives” and see workplace learning as an essential part of these. In other words, they conceptualise workplace learning as part of a person’s wider living and learning throughout their life course. Recognising that living and learning to work run alongside each other as part of lifelong learning (Yorozu 2017 ), the present article aims to take this approach further, and to conceptualise how people learn in workplaces when roles alter or when people change workplaces. In the ever-changing world we live in today, understanding the dynamics of workplace learning is key in pursuing the United Nations fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote] lifelong learning opportunities for all” (UN 2015 , p. 14).

Methodology

This article draws on data from a completed case study of a group of twelve individuals learning to become vocational teachers in Brunei. The central aim of the original study was to understand how a group of in-service teachers learn prior to and during a one-year initial teacher preparation programme at a local university. The case study is framed within an interpretive qualitative framework which operates on the ontological assumption that “truth” or social reality is socially constructed by individuals (Lincoln and Guba 2000 ). As an interpretive researcher, I tried to construct a meaningful story from the participants’ point of view and at the same time maximise the benefits of my own experience and insights. My experience both as a student teacher and as a staff member in the same faculty influenced my pre-assumptions about how individuals learn.

I conducted my study at a local university in Brunei between 2007 and 2008. Ethical approval was granted through appropriate channels. All participants were fully informed of the purpose of my research, what the study entailed and the duration of the study, and each of them provided informed consent for their involvement in the study. Anonymity and confidentiality were assured for all participants of the study, including the use of pseudonyms for respondents’ names. Although I was a staff member in the same Faculty of Education at the time of my study, I was not involved in teaching the particular group of student teachers who participated in my study. In order to challenge my pre-assumptions about what I expected to find, I applied Harry Wolcott’s ( 1994 ) method of transforming qualitative data and Clark Moustakas’s ( 1990 ) heuristic method of analysis, which involves changing the data into something meaningful through immersion. I will return to this in the later part of the methodology section.

The group of twelve in-service teachers who participated in my case study had been teaching for at least one year in a vocational college prior to joining the programme at a local university. Footnote 1 During the programme, they returned to their workplaces for their teaching placements. In order to understand their learning journey, I asked participants to recall both their past teaching experiences in workplaces and their experiences during the teacher training programme. Fieldwork involved two rounds of data collection between 2007 and 2008.

Although the case study was carried out some time ago, my concern here is with questions that are not restricted to specific times, policies, or structural arrangements that might well alter considerably over ten or twenty years. One of the strengths of using a case study approach is to facilitate rich conceptual development where existing theories like the theory of learning cultures are brought up against complex realities. The data about the learning of these trainee teachers can help to generate new thinking and ideas. In this study of trainee teachers’ learning, the concept of a “learning journey” emphasises the interrelationship between individuals and learning cultures across their working lives, particularly with reference to the “change-over-time” dimension of their workplace learning. Such change might include the kind of experiences that the individual learners in my study have at each of their workplace settings and their relationship to these workplaces as their roles change.

Data collection

Data collection involved two semi-structured interviews with each participant, one at the beginning and one at the end of the initial teacher preparation programme. The interviews, which were digitally recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim, were conducted in English. They lasted on average 60 minutes and consisted of open-ended questions that focused on participants’ career decisions, learning in their workplaces and learning on the initial teacher preparation programme. In the first round of interviews, I asked participants about their workplace learning retrospectively. They were also asked to share their learning experiences as trainee teachers at their teaching placements, i.e. their workplaces.

The second round of interviews was derived from and informed by the analysis of the first round. These interviews, which lasted on average 60 minutes, included follow-up questions to take the interview to a deeper level by asking for more detail (Rossman and Rallis 2003 ), and also included questions that enabled participants to share their learning experiences from the programme. Due to the limited time frame and resources, I drew my case study data from trainee teachers’ interview data alone, which could be seen as a limitation. However, given the nature of my data and how they were collected, the participants’ perspectives were central to how I made sense of the specific learning cultures of their workplaces and their different roles, which subsequently influenced my analysis of the data. Moreover, I complemented my interview data with key documentation about the teacher training preparation programme. Collecting and analysing this material to provide an understanding of the context also subsequently confirmed my knowledge of the training of vocational teachers.

Data analysis

The process of data collection and data analysis was cyclical. Each stage of data analysis helped to inform the subsequent data collection, which focused on deepening understanding and examining in-depth experiences of the trainee teachers at their workplaces. The analysis of the data involved two stages. The first stage was carried out during the first round of interviews. I approached my interview data with reference to the three-stage process of description, analysis and interpretation to transform qualitative data (Wolcott 1994 ). The process of description involved drawing up individual case stories to obtain an in-depth understanding of each participant’s career decisions and learning in the workplace. I then subjected these stories to re-analysis in the light of data obtained from the second interview.

I also used Moustakas’ ( 1990 ) “heuristic analysis” to make sense of the data through immersion, then standing back and allowing the subconscious to work. Moustakas’ heuristic method provided a framework for guidance and clarification which helped to challenge my pre-assumptions from my own experiences. Sandy Sela-Smith ( 2002 ) acknowledges that this makes Moustakas’ method a valuable tool in the exploration of subjective human experience, especially the experiences of student teachers when they move from one context to another. My own personal experience as a student teacher and a staff member on the teacher training programme acted as a catalyst for inquiry. As Moustakas ( 1990 ) makes clear, the qualities of tacit knowing (Polanyi 1983 ) and intuition are crucial components of heuristic inquiry. Drawing on Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln’s ( 1989 ) version of the “hermeneutic circle”, analysis of the data involved moving between the parts and the whole. Neither of these could be understood without reference to the other, as “meanings c[an] only be understood in relation to a larger whole” (Hollway and Jefferson 2000 ).

Through immersion in the first and second interview transcripts, I wrote up case studies of individual student-teachers’ learning for each participant using a largely descriptive process incorporating significant sections of the original interview data to represent the individual’s own words. The main reason for writing up individual case studies for each participant was not just to produce a story for that individual, but also to understand how they learned to become a vocational teacher through engaging in different learning contexts across their career journey. In the second stage of analysis, I compared the twelve case studies in terms of issues, patterns, commonalities and differences, which is part of Moustakas’ ( 1990 ) heuristic research. The revealed patterns were examined, and themes began to emerge through a rigorous inductive and iterative process. The procedure also involved contextualising the data within a broader theoretical framework in the same research field. Here, the theory of learning cultures based on Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of cultural and other forms of “capital” (Bourdieu 1986 ) provided an overarching framework and a set of “thinking tools” to link the case studies with broader issues.

Revisiting two participants’ learning journeys

In this article, I focus on two individuals, Mary and Phillip, to explore their learning at their workplaces. Mary and Phillip were both training to become vocational teachers, but were, at the time of my study, at different stages of their learning journey, with different roles. These stages include their workplace learning as full-time teachers before enrolling in their teacher training programme (i.e. during their first few years of teaching) and their learning as in-service trainee teachers in their workplaces.

I have chosen Mary’s and Phillip’s stories for a specific reason. Research has shown that worker position, status, and the nature of work can influence individual learning and career development (Billett 2001 ; Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2004 ). This article aims to explore these differences and the individuals’ dispositions towards learning across the different learning cultures in which they participated. My findings show that the interrelationships between positions, identity and agency play a significant role in influencing workplace learning at different stages of becoming a vocational teacher. At the time of my study, Mary and Phillip were both in-service teachers in the early stages of their career, with different career trajectories. Although both had enrolled in the same teacher training programme, their approaches to learning differed. I argue that this difference is due to the interrelationship between individual positions and dispositions to learning and workplace learning cultures.

The following stories are constructed based on the interview data alone. These constructed stories are mine. One might argue that there are always different versions of personal stories that can be constructed (Stronach and MacLure 1997 ). For some researchers of a realist bent (Feuer et al. 2002 ), this might call into question the validity of my findings. My response to such critics is that, with qualitative data like mine, researchers do their best to tell a version of the truth as honestly as possible, and there is no doubt that some uncertainties will remain. Nevertheless, the credibility of the research is strengthened if other researchers working in a similar setting end up with similar stories. The credibility of the research then becomes a matter of coherence, as John Smith argues succinctly:

For interpretive inquiry, the basis of truth or trustworthiness is social agreement; what is judged true or trustworthy is what we can agree, conditioned by time and place, is true or trustworthy (Smith 1984 , p. 386).

Moreover, the findings from this study may also “ring true” in other settings. Readers can judge for themselves whether the analysis presented sounds convincing based on what they know of similar settings. In addition, I have established rigour in my research findings through a coherent methodology, i.e. by using case studies within an interpretive framework. Thus, the rationale for every stage of the methodology is made clear.

The interrelationship between individual positions, identity and agency in workplace learning

In order to contextualise the findings in this section, I will first provide case descriptions of Mary and Phillip to give some sense of “change over time” as a dimension of workplace learning as they change roles at their workplaces. Following this, I use the concepts of position , identity and agency that underpin the proposed “learning journey” to analyse and discuss these case descriptions.

Learning as a new teacher

Mary, a Malay woman, had been employed as a full-time tutor at nursing college. Prior to becoming a nurse tutor, she undertook training in the same nursing college before going overseas to further her studies. Upon graduation, she joined the staff of the college. Initially, she was appointed as a coordinator, a role which she felt she had been appointed to prematurely. Her colleagues, who were also her teachers at that time, had high expectations of her. Because she had a higher degree qualification, they appointed her as a coordinator straight away:

“Their high expectations have thrown me off the board … I wanted them to know that I have limited teaching experience … I didn’t think that I gave an impression that I knew everything, but they thought that being a postgraduate student, I should be knowledgeable. Some colleagues challenged me that way which in a way intimidated me. They would put up their wall …”

Mary had expected to be allocated a mentor who could guide her when she first joined the teaching staff, but she was not given one. She felt lost as she was provided neither with a curriculum nor a formal induction in how to deliver it. Despite this lack of support, she managed to develop her teaching skills through trial and error and chose to teach modules where she felt she could contribute. She also chose to take the initiative to learn from her colleagues:

“I made my initiative to come to some of the colleagues which I considered as a good teacher, to observe how they teach the subjects which I will be teaching. I sat in a few of their classes and I even co-teach with these teachers.” [emphasis added]

She also co-taught with another colleague whom she had the chance to observe before being given some lessons to teach herself. She remembered her first lesson, where she did not know how to begin or which teaching approach to use. However, she was able to draw on her past observations of her colleague, which helped her to continue with the teaching. In addition, she did have the support of a buddy system which consisted of junior tutors who had already been through the teacher training programme. As well as sharing resources, this buddy system allowed them to conduct “cross-teaching”, a new approach whereby all of them collaborated to deliver the curriculum across different levels, instead of just one level of any particular programme.

As a nurse tutor, Mary also had to teach in a clinical setting. She felt she lacked the clinical experience to be able to demonstrate practical knowledge of nursing, as she had not worked as a nurse:

“… my undergraduate degree has prepared me with a lot of practical experience but it is different when you are a nurse in the hospital. I am groomed strongly in theory, but theory is useless if you don’t know the practical side of it, which made me feel deficient.”

Mary therefore did not have a smooth transition into her first year of teaching. Instead, she had to be proactive in building social relationships with her colleagues and finding learning opportunities, since the college itself gave her limited support.

In contrast to Mary’s story, Phillip’s learning trajectory to becoming a vocational teacher went comparatively smoothly. Phillip, a middle-aged Chinese man, decided to go into teaching after working for several years as an engineer abroad. He developed an interest in teaching after mentoring some work-attachment (trainee) students at his engineering workplace. He was eager to join the teacher training programme to equip himself with the appropriate pedagogical skills. When he first joined his college, he saw himself as an engineer and a teacher:

“I see myself as an engineer and a teacher because I think it has to be together. For me you cannot be a good engineering lecturer unless you are also a good engineer in terms of your knowledge … keeping update with what is going in the industry, for example, and know what is happening in the industry is important …”

Due to his previous role as an engineer, Phillip would teach his students in the same way that he made presentations as an engineer to his clients. Unlike Mary, Phillip was allocated an unofficial mentor who helped him transition into his workplace. Phillip’s mentor was helpful and supported Phillip by sharing teaching resources with him. They would discuss different issues, and the mentor would challenge Phillip with difficult tutorial questions. Phillip was also given opportunities to be involved in developing the curriculum. He therefore had a chance to understand the content of each of the programmes.

Learning as a trainee teacher

During her enrolment in the teacher training programme, Mary found it useful to return to her workplace for her teaching placement every Monday to try out different teaching methods that she had learnt in the programme. Phillip was less keen to try out the methods he had learnt in the programme at his placements. Having taught in his college for the past three years, Phillip had already gained knowledge of the teaching approaches which were most useful to teaching his subject, and he was familiar with the type and level of his students. When introduced to new methods of teaching and learning, he therefore decided to continue what he had been doing before entering the programme:

“… I can see the point of using these methods, but I am not so sure whether I want to implement it all as much as [name of university lecturer] would like in my lectures … I will still use my own way of structuring my lesson and will do one for the university.”

Mary found it challenging to switch her role to that of trainee teacher at her workplace every Monday. She had to adjust to her role as a learner and learn to negotiate with her mentor, who was also the headmaster of her college, to observe her teaching. Her colleagues continued to see her as their full-time colleague rather than as someone who still needed time to acquire the full range of skills a teacher possesses. Mary therefore had to learn to be proactive in protecting her role as a learner when on her teacher training programme:

“Most of them view me as a professional colleague … They wanted to give me a lot of hours to teach ... I also need to be very assertive … or else I would end up 100 hours of teaching and top up with what I have to do here [university].” [emphasis added]

Like Mary, Phillip also continued to be seen by his colleagues as their full-time colleague. Unlike Mary, however, he also saw himself as a full-time teacher and continued to perform his role when given the usual administrative duties:

“… we have to supervise projects as well … and for this semester, I have to take on more teaching workload … I am also the timetable coordinator for the department ...”

Phillip had had the same mentor when he first entered teaching. However, he did not entirely follow his mentor’s advice:

“… he is helpful when he has the time. If I ask anything, he will help. He gives a lot of advice, maybe some of it I will use it. Although he has more experience than me, I still disagree with certain things he said … he has got his own points and views about certain things. For example, for assessments, he would do certain things certain ways, I would say ... there is another way of doing it … I find I don’t do everything he does, but I find his advice and guidance very helpful.”

“Learning cultures” and “dispositions”

Mary’s and Phillip’s stories illustrate how they learn at their workplaces with different roles. There is an extensive body of literature which shows how learning is situated. Lave and Wenger suggest that:

learning is not merely situated in practice – as if it were some independently reifiable process that just happened to be located somewhere; learning is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world (Lave and Wenger 1991 , p. 35).

Phil Hodkinson et al. ( 2007b ) prefer to understand the social practices through which people learn as “learning cultures”. Therefore, within any workplace, a learning culture exists. It follows that participation in different learning cultures will influence individuals’ lives differently (Biesta et al. 2011 ). What is equally important is the position of individuals in these workplace learning cultures, as these influence the way they perceive their work practices. Put another way, individuals have subjective perceptions called dispositions which are located within their objective positions. Dispositions are more than schemata of perceptions or beliefs. Rather, these perceptions derive from and are part of the whole person. Bourdieu uses the term “habitus” to capture all this, defined as a battery of dispositions accumulated through ongoing life experiences that are durable and transposable (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ). Individual positions influence learning in many ways. For example, social positions can be historical and geographical, or situated within particular learning cultures (see Hodkinson et al. 2008 ).

When Mary first joined her teaching job, she was in a better position than other newcomers like Phillip since she had herself once been a student of this college, i.e. her new workplace. She knew many of the lecturers, and was able to draw on her own student experiences to inform her teaching. In Bourdieu’s terms, she had both cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1986 ). Cultural capital is defined as the amount of knowledge relative to the learning culture. It is deemed valuable, since it usually determines whether a person will succeed (ibid.). Social capital is an individual’s network of relations with other people (ibid.).

Legitimate peripheral participation vs. being thrown in at the deep end

As a newcomer, Mary would normally be positioned at the periphery of the workplace community of practice and gradually learn the ropes before being given full responsibility for a task. Lave and Wenger ( 1991 ) refer to this as “legitimate peripheral participation”. Instead, she was thrown in at the deep end, like the teachers in Colin Lacey’s ( 1977 ) study. She was given limited support and no mentor, yet was expected to take on full responsibility. Her accrued cultural capital in terms of her subject knowledge and social capital from her student years did not help her to learn as a newcomer. They may even have created a barrier to her learning opportunities. Elsewhere (Goh and Zukas 2016 ) a co-author and myself have reported similar findings, which contradict Bourdieu, who states that having cultural capital makes one likely to succeed in the relevant field (Bourdieu 1986 ). We argue that cultural capital is not the only aspect that should be considered when trying to understand how individuals learn in a learning context (see also Goh 2014 ). Mary’s story clearly shows the opposite. In hindsight, it is worth noting that Lave and Wenger ( 1991 ) did not address the issue of newcomers having to take on full responsibility without being allowed to experience the process of legitimate peripheral participation. Mary’s story shows that newcomers are not always necessarily positioned at the periphery of a community of practice.

It is similarly worth noting that Hodkinson et al. ( 2007b ) did not explicitly discuss how individuals manage the transition from newcomer to full member in such a short timescale within a learning culture. The lack of time for this transition requires individuals to adapt quickly to the new role and the level of responsibility that comes with it. Mary’s account of her learning is similar to what Miriam Zukas and Sue Kilminster ( 2012 ) call the “critical intensive learning period”. This occurs when individuals are not treated as newcomers when transitioning to new areas of work and responsibilities, but are instead “thrown in at the deep end” and expected to be experts and act with full responsibility. Similarly, Hodkinson and Hodkinson’s research study ( 2003 , 2004 ) showed that when an experienced teacher changed to a new job, they were expected to be an expert from the outset. Unlike Mary, Phillip, who was positioned at the periphery and who lacked cultural and social capital in relation to his workplace, had a smooth transition into becoming a teacher with the support of his mentor.

Identity and changing roles

Due to Mary’s ambiguous position in relation to her workplace, she had a difficult transition period from learning as a new teacher to learning as a trainee teacher compared to Phillip. Within the literature, there is limited understanding of how the change of positions in relation to the workplace influences individuals’ learning. What emerges strongly from these two stories is that change over time through learning within the workplace is influenced by the change of roles from teacher to trainee teacher. Subsequently, the extent of this influence on individuals’ dispositions to learn depends on the tension between their “self-identity” (how they see themselves in relation to the situation) and how they exercise their agency when colleagues continue to see them as full-time teachers. Mary’s story reveals a marked tension between her “self-identity” and how she was viewed by her colleagues, which compelled her to exercise her agency to protect her learner status.

Identity can also be defined as a person’s disposition about themselves (Biesta et al. 2011 ). Defining it in this way allows us to think of identity as more than a cognitive concept, since most of the time we cannot articulate clearly who we are, and even if we are and do, much is left out. That is, our accumulated dispositions add up to more than how we think of ourselves. At the same time, how we see ourselves underpins many of our dispositions towards life.

The stories of Mary and Phillip illustrate the influence of early-career vocational teachers’ dual identities (Fejes and Köpsén 2014 ) on their learning journey. Phillip saw himself as an engineer as well as a teacher. He recognised the need to learn to teach whilst still keeping his vocational skills up to date with developments in the industry. Similarly, Mary stressed the importance of equipping herself with clinical skills, since these reflected upon her credibility as a nurse tutor. Mary saw herself as a nurse tutor much of the time, but she never explicitly talked about how her clinical nursing knowledge influenced her teaching. Mary talked on several occasions about teaching her students the importance of emotional care and the subtleties of caring for older patients. This illustrates the overlap between an individual’s identity and the roles they are called on to play. How individuals see themselves is linked to their roles in the workplace. The stories in this article show that it is important to understand both how newcomers view themselves and the expectations placed on them by other people in their role as new workers in the workplace, which tends to be overlooked in the literature.

Coping strategies

Mary and Phillip were both able to shape their responses to the situations they encountered in their workplaces in different ways. They responded differently based on the relationship between how they saw their own roles in their workplaces and how others saw them. Mary comes across as a very strong-willed person. She struggled to maintain her role due to the tensions between her identity and her position within the learning culture. As discussed earlier on, tensions arose when she saw herself as a new teacher, but her colleagues viewed her as an expert. Her colleagues had high expectations of her capability and therefore gave her minimal support in learning to teach. She was thus obliged to construct learning relationships (Goh 2013 ) with her “buddies” which allowed her to learn to teach by “cross-teaching” with them. Tensions also arose when Mary saw herself as a trainee teacher, but her colleagues viewed her as a full-time teacher. She had to be proactive in keeping her learner status in order to be able to learn in her workplace. These tensions were difficult to reconcile. They resulted in Mary having to exercise her agency in constructing or reshaping her work role and identity.

In Phillip’s story, there are several examples of tensions between his identity and his position when he returned to his workplace as a trainee teacher. Unlike Mary, Phillip saw himself as a teacher and was viewed as such by his colleagues, who gave him administrative tasks. He managed his tensions differently to Mary by being proactive in taking up these tasks. His actions and dispositions can be described as “strategic compliance” in satisfying the needs of his workplace. Phillip also exercised his agency when writing two sets of lesson plans: one to satisfy the university programme’s requirements and another reflecting the way he had been teaching prior to enrolling on the programme. Tensions arose when there was disagreement between Phillip and his mentor regarding teaching methods. In these instances Phillip was seen to be taking control of his learning.

As Mary and Phillip transitioned to a different level of work and responsibility involving a change of roles over time, they were required to practise some degree of agency in “negotiating their identity positions” (Eteläpelto et al. 2013 , 2014 ; Vähäsantanen and Eteläpelto 2009 , 2011 ; Goh 2013 ) in order to change work practices. This requirement creates differences in individuals’ dispositions to learning in their respective workplaces even among people with the same status of trainee teacher. Put simply, the difference in individuals’ learning results from the interrelationship between three concepts: position, identity and agency . Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische ( 1998 , p. 971) argue that agency is the “capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations”. Drawing on this idea, Gert Biesta and Michael Tedder see agency as “the ability to exert control over and give direction to one’s life” (Biesta and Tedder 2007 , p. 135). Biesta et al. ( 2011 ) argue that agency is the individual’s ability to change parts of their dispositions and/or their positions. The stories of Mary and Phillip clearly show that the variation in the exercise of agency depends on an individual’s identities, professional competence and relations to other professionals in the workplace (Vähäsantanen et al. 2009 ; Kersh 2015 ). In circumstances like those of Mary and Phillip where work roles and identity are not clearly defined for other workers, individuals need to exercise agency to establish their own professional identities (Eteläpelto et al. 2013 ). An individual’s agentic actions are akin to striving for distinction in order to survive and be successful (Bourdieu 1984 ).

The “learning journey”: the interrelationship between individuals and workplace learning cultures

The change-over-time dimension of workplace learning is seen when individuals change workplaces or change their roles within the same workplace over a period of time, which usually results in a change of work practices. Mary’s and Phillip’s stories illustrate that the interrelationship between individual positions, agency and identity is paramount to understanding an individual’s lifelong workplace learning. When Mary and Phillip changed roles within their workplaces, their positions changed in relation to their workplaces’ learning cultures. To cope with this, they were then required to exercise their agency which was largely tied to their identities. These findings concur with the argument of Anneli Eteläpelto et al. ( 2013 ) that in order to construct meaningful life courses we should focus on how individuals negotiate agency in work and life. To develop a robust conceptualisation of lifelong workplace learning, we need to explore the learning cultures of the different workplaces in which individuals participate. Learning can only be understood through the interrelationship of the learning cultures of workplaces and individuals.

At all levels, there is a complex interaction between individual dispositions and identity on the one hand, and individual positions in a range of workplaces on the other, each with its own learning culture. When the roles of Mary and Phillip changed from teacher to trainee teacher, the learning cultures within their workplaces also shifted. Their stories illustrate the importance of individual positions and dispositions in relation to practices within the workplace (Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2004 ; Goh 2021 ). This study also reconfirms Hodkinson’s concepts of “learning careers” and “learning lives”, since it shows that individuals’ dispositions to learning can develop and change over time through interaction with different learning cultures across the lifespan. Simultaneously, learning cultures within the workplace can change over time, which often results in either continuity or changes in practices.

Mary’s and Phillip’s actions and dispositions to learning exist in relation to many other factors which influence the learning cultures of their workplaces. Their learning was also dependent on and shaped by workplace affordances , which are constituted by workplace hierarchies, contestation and personal relations (Billett 2001 ). On the other hand, the learning opportunities that an individual can see in their workplace are limited by the position they occupy and the horizons that are visible from that position. Hodkinson et al. prefer to describe this as an individual’s “horizon of learning”. That is,

… in any situation there are opportunities to learn. What those opportunities are, and the ways in which the process of learning takes place, depends on the nature of the learning culture and of the position, habitus and capitals of the individuals, in interaction with each other in their horizons for learning, as part of a field of relationships (Hodkinson et al. 2008 , p. 41).

This process, a kind of “learning to become”, also depends on the individual’s receptiveness and the extent to which s/he is able to recognise the learning support available from others, in order to maintain individual engagement with the activities for continuing development. When tensions surfaced, Mary was able to leverage her buddy system to learn to teach. Anne Edwards ( 2015 ) calls this “relational agency”, referring to individuals’ capacity to be receptive and engage with others as resources.

Learning as becoming

Mary’s and Phillip’s learning to “become” involved a change in roles within the same workplace. They needed to (re)negotiate their identities in different circumstances, which depended partly on how their colleagues saw them and partly on how they themselves saw their changing roles. Lesley Scanlon ( 2011 ) argues that the process of “becoming” involves individuals rehearsing their “possible or provisional selves” (Ibarra 1999 ). In line with other scholars (Billett 2011 ; Harteis and Goller 2014 ; Vähäsantanen et al. 2017 ), the stories of Mary and Phillip highlight that individual agency is crucial in the formation of individuals’ learning and the development of professional identities where learning and practice are relational (Billett 2010 ).

Given the complexity of the interrelationship between individuals and their context, individuals’ lifelong workplace learning can be viewed as a journey, which considers individuals’ learning as becoming through participating in different learning cultures longitudinally throughout the entire length of their life. Mary and Phillip continued to learn throughout their working life, and thus continued to “become”. This process of “learning to become” can be one of change or of continuity, depending on the individual’s changing roles and positions. Individuals are always “becoming” through continuous learning experiences which become a part of them (Jarvis 2007 ), and which either reinforce or change their dispositions. This study shows that individuals learn to become through exercising their agency in different ways, either changing or reinforcing their practices in the workplace. This in turn illustrates that individuals can only learn to become through participating in the practices within their learning cultures.

The concept of a “learning journey” is useful in researching individuals’ change over time as a dimension of workplace learning, which involves either a change of workplaces or a change of role within the workplace. A learning journey highlights the significance of the interrelationship between individual dispositions and ever-changing learning contexts (in this case, Mary’s and Phillip’s different workplaces). The learning journey considers the complex interrelationships between individual agency, positions and identity, which vary between individuals, at different times and in different situations. This highlights the need for lifelong learning policies to consider individual responsibility for learning and workplace affordances (Billett 2001 ), while also taking account of the necessity of informal learning (Marsick and Watkins 1990 ).

The concept of a “learning journey” addresses the limitations of existing workplace learning theories which overlook the perspectives of either the individual learner or the workplaces. It does this by signifying the importance of individual learners and their habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ) where learning is embodied, rather than simplistically trying to understand learning by looking only at the work practices within a work organisation. The concept of a “learning journey” is timely since it helps us to reconsider change over time as a dimension of workplace learning, in ways which look beyond the traditional linear career progression in this unpredictable postmodern era. It brings a fresh perspective on how individual lifelong workplace learning can be supported through unprecedented and disruptive events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

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GOH, A.Y. Learning journey: Conceptualising “change over time” as a dimension of workplace learning. Int Rev Educ 68 , 81–100 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-022-09942-0

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Crucial Skills®

A blog by crucial learning, trainer insights, maps, paths, and destinations: how to plan for a successful learning journey.

Many years ago, my husband and I set out on a spontaneous weekend trip: no hotel reservations, no agenda, no destination. Our plan was simply to see where the road would take us.

As we began our journey, we decided not to go very far from home, opting to spend more time enjoying whatever destination we chose. Along the way we spotted a billboard for a highly recommended restaurant about 30 miles away. We decided to splurge on dinner and use that as the anchor for our getaway.

Destination decided, we had a great day adventuring in the area, finding shops in small rural communities and making discoveries close enough to home to be enjoyed again. At the end of the day, we drove up to the entrance to the rustic but elegant dining room, excited about sampling an eclectic and upscale menu.

The restaurant was closed for remodeling.

Our entire day had been planned around this location and this end goal. We sat for a minute looking at the darkened windows and the rather cheerful “See you soon” sign, wondering what to do next. What to do now that our plans (poorly laid as they were) had radically changed?

The short end of that story is that we got dinner—at the local Dairy Queen. While filling, it was not the glorious ending to our day we had envisioned.

Rolling out high-impact training and realizing effective behavior change in an organization is a journey. Planning carefully and having a clear goal in mind at the outset will give you not only improved performance but will also help you reach those destinations most important to your organization.

The first step is to understand your why . Knowing that you have made a difference in your organization is what drives good trainers to become great facilitators—and that often starts with understanding the answer to these four questions:

• Why are you bringing the content to your organization?
• What business outcomes do you want to achieve?
• How does the course tie into your organization’s initiatives?
• What are your organization’s biggest needs?

As you evaluate the answers to these questions, chances are your responses will relate to skill acquisition, organization initiatives, or culture change.

Once you have determined your why, it’s time to create an action plan . The strategic decisions in your plan are very likely the most important and should be centered around people (the who), marketing (the how), and course delivery (the where).

We often get excited about taking off on that proverbial road trip without a clear map or having verified the destination. Be patient at the decision-making step! This is your map.

When my husband and I started on our trip, we chose a very haphazard approach. While this sounded fun at the time, the lack of clear decision making and strategic planning left us scratching our heads at the end of the day. For training programs to be effective, you need to make careful, thoughtful decisions with a clear end in mind. This will provide a return on expectations to savor at the end of the journey.

Once you’ve made decisions (with support from your key stakeholders), you’re ready to make it happen .

This is the fun part! This is standing in the classroom and greeting your participants. This is watching people engaged in a virtual poll or come back from a breakout session saying that they wished they had more time to talk. This is the part that gives every trainer I know that “fizz.”

But as enjoyable as this part is, it too requires thoughtful preparation.

Whether you are facilitating in person or virtually, it is important to have a checklist and to practice. Even very experienced trainers sometimes forget their clicker or misplace their laptop charger. Having a tried-and-true checklist and running through your presentation at least three times will give you the foundation to confidently deliver your course, whether you have taught once or hundreds of times.

You have created a great map, you know your destination, you have made it happen—your participants have carried you out of the room on their shoulders as the hero of the day. Now what? How do you make it stick ?

Without follow up, sustaining the skills learned can be like the restaurant closed for remodeling. You were hoping for high-end cuisine and got a burger and fries instead.

Ensure that your investment of time, energy, and training dollars achieves the desired impact with after-training resources, engaging mini-learning sessions, and effective measurement. Measurement is where you can connect outcomes back to your purpose. Did the map you created get you to your destination? Were all the lights on when you arrived? Did you get to savor the product of all your hard work?

The end of that spontaneous road trip with my husband, while comical, was not what we had hoped for—but it was a direct reflection of what we had planned. Learning and development professionals have enormous influence in organizations. It is in carefully and thoughtfully planning a high-impact learning journey that we move from good courses to great training experiences with the power to change lives.

For additional help planning your learning journey, check out our implementation guide .

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The dos and don’ts of getting started with service learning

Service learning can have many benefits for students, teachers and the wider community, but starting out can be intimidating. Grace Ngai offers one don’t and three dos to begin your journey

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So, you’re interested in teaching service learning, or you’ve been tasked to incorporate service learning into your classroom. For all its benefits for the student, service learning can be quite daunting for the teacher. After all, there are many more moving parts to a service learning subject than a regular subject, and more stakeholders are involved. 

Service learning is more than a subject

Service learning is an experiential pedagogy that integrates meaningful community service with academic study and reflection. It provides students with practical learning experiences while addressing societal needs. Recognised internationally as a high-impact pedagogy in higher education, service learning is associated with a wide range of outcomes, some of which are not easy to achieve in more traditional classroom settings. Research has shown positive relationships between service learning and other desirable outcome factors such as student retention and graduation rates. Given these benefits, it’s not surprising that service learning has been widely adopted in K-12 and higher education. 

Teachers play a critical role in service learning. Our research indicates that, compared with factors such as student motivation and background, the student learning experience is the only factor consistently and significantly impacting the core learning outcomes. This underpins many of our recommendations for aspiring teachers embarking on service learning. The teachers must be able to properly prepare students for their service, help them apply their classroom knowledge in new contexts, and critically reflect on their service learning experience and learn from it. 

• How service learning can help students create a positive change in the community
• Changing lives through community engagement and outreach
• Open to all? Using our physical and digital spaces to better engage local communities

With this in mind, we offer one DON’T and three DOs for teachers beginning their service learning journey.

Don’t: instruct students to independently project plan without a framework in place

You could argue that students who are asked to identify their own projects would be more likely to come up with something they are interested in. But if you are not involved in your students’ project planning, how will you ensure they are sufficiently prepared to complete their projects? 

Project coordination often involves negotiation, compromise and patience, aspects that may be beyond the capabilities of many undergraduate students. Make sure to provide a framework they can use.

Do: choose a project or community you are passionate about

Are you a computer science teacher with a passion for computer games? One of the most interesting and successful projects we have seen brought students to serve in a centre for the physically disabled. Before their service, students developed virtual reality games that encouraged moving and stretching for the patients. Over time, their efforts blossomed into an open-source platform hosting customised solutions for special education schools in Hong Kong. When working with something that you care about, your expertise becomes a resource. This, in turn, makes it easier for you to effectively prepare and support your students.

Do: design projects that provide immediate benefits for the target community

While there are many meaningful advocacy projects that can raise awareness for a worthy cause, students learn best in service learning when they perceive that their efforts are of real value and appreciated by the community. 

As an example, our Department of Applied Mathematics has a service learning project in which students are tasked to perform data analysis for non-governmental organisations to help with project reporting or proposal writing. As part of their project, students get involved as volunteers in an outreach activity run by the NGO. This brings them into contact with the target community and vividly illustrates the societal challenges that make the NGO’s services necessary.

Do: make sure the project plan is concrete and practical

While starting with tightly prescribed projects may seem overly restrictive, remember, as the teacher, you are also learning. This is especially critical when dealing with larger student groups. 

For example, if your project involves providing interest workshops to children from low-income families, confirm the logistics, such as the detailed schedule and location, in advance with your service partner and also have an agreement on the learning outcomes and tasks to be covered. These parameters provide a structure upon which the service project can be scaffolded, for you and your students. More pragmatically, unclear expectations constitute the vast majority of the complaints we hear from students and are also one of the major reasons service learning partnerships do not work out. Tightly prescribing a project helps minimise this risk. It also informs your partner of your expectations and how they can cooperate with your team.

Service learning offers an amazing experience, unexpected opportunities for teachers and students, and real community benefits. However, it does take additional effort on the part of the teacher compared with more traditional classroom teaching. So that you can maintain your passion for teaching students and serving the community, it is crucial for teachers to prioritise their own physical and emotional well-being when teaching service learning. After all, as the well-known airline safety instruction goes: “Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.”

Grace Ngai is head of the Service-Learning and Leadership Office at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

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English Learning Resources for Non-Native Speakers

Posted: April 03, 2024 | Author: Wanting Qiao | Read Time: 3 minutes

For non-native speakers, improving English skills and proficiency is pivotal during their university studies. A strong command of the English language not only aids in understanding academic materials but also opens doors to academic achievement, career advancement and meaningful social interactions in an English-speaking environment. Recognizing the importance of linguistic diversity and inclusion, SUU provides a multitude of resources to support individuals from all backgrounds on their language learning journey.

Here are four SUU resources for helping non-native speakers enhance their English language skills and cultural fluency.

ALCC Programs

ALCC (American Language and Culture Center) helps students in their English learning journey by providing several academic programs.

Workshop Classes

For undergraduate and graduate students who want to further develop with their English skills and proficiency, the Academic English (ACEN) workshop classes are strongly recommended. Students can learn the language needed for their General Education and major classes through the workshop classes, which include diverse topics such as note-taking, strategic reading, pronunciation, presentation skills, academic vocabulary and research writing.

Community English as a Second Language (ESL) Classes

Community ESL classes are preferred for students who already live in the Cedar City area. Through the generous support of Zions Bank, this program was funded to help people integrate into the local community. By taking community ESL classes, students will gain the language skills essential for navigating daily life and succeeding in various workplace settings. If you are interested in embarking on this enriching educational journey, we warmly encourage you to reach out to the ALCC and explore their diverse programs.

VISAS Program (Volunteers with International Students and Scholars)

VISAS is a volunteer program to encourage interaction and friendship between domestic students and international students.

Students seeking not only to refine their language skills but also to forge meaningful connections with their peers are welcome to attend VISAS cafe, which is a free conversation club with snacks and drinks (when not held virtually), and just enjoy socializing with other students. Unlike traditional clubs or events, no prior signup is required for VISAS Cafe, ensuring accessibility and spontaneity for all who wish to participate in this enriching social and linguistic exchange.

Additionally, whether you are a domestic student or an international student, if you’re a fluent English speaker, you can volunteer to be a Language and Culture Consultants, who meet individually with international students and have conversations in English. Another volunteer role is the Classroom Assistants (CA), who come to English as a Second Language (ESL) classes held on campus or virtually and act as teaching assistants. Sign up here as a volunteer to help international students learn English!

Writing Center

The SUU Writing Center is a free service dedicated to supporting student writing in any undergraduate and graduate class at SUU. Students can discuss their writing projects with trained consultants and receive constructive feedback to enhance their English skills, knowledge and overall confidence with writing and research.

Speech & Presentation Center

For students who lack confidence in their English presentations, the Speech and Presentation Center is here to help. Staffed by SUU students, the Speech and Presentation Center aims to support students, faculty and staff in enhancing their speech writing and presentation skills. Their staff hold invaluable skills in both design and oral presentation for any person with a message. Communication, Confidence and Creativity are the core standards for every presentation they coach.

As you embark on your journey to enhance your English language skills and cultural fluency, we encourage you to take full advantage of the invaluable resources available at SUU. Check out these resources today and unlock new pathways to academic and professional success!

Tags: CurStu ALCC Campus Resources Career and Personal Development

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Learning journey: Conceptualising “change over time” as a dimension of workplace learning

Adeline yuen sze goh.

Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei

Understanding how individuals learn at work throughout their lives is significant for discussions of lifelong learning in the current era where changes can be unpredictable and frequent, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite a corpus of literature on the subject of “learning”, there is little research or theoretical understanding of “change over time” as a dimension of individual learning at work. Increasing emphasis has been put on individuals’ personal development, since they play key mediating roles in organisations’ work practices. This article proposes the concept of the “learning journey” to explore the relational complexity of how individuals learn at different workplace settings across their working lives. In order to illuminate this, the article draws on the learning experiences of two workers with different roles at two points in time across different workplaces. The author argues that individual learning involves a complex interaction of individual positions, identities and agency towards learning. This complexity is relational and interrelated with the workplace learning culture, which is why learning is different for individuals in different workplaces and even for the same person in the same workplace when occupying different roles.

Résumé

Itinéraire d’apprentissage : conceptualisation du « changement au fil du temps » en tant que dimension de l’apprentissage sur le lieu de travail – Comprendre comment les individus apprennent au fil de l’existence en milieu professionnel est important pour nourrir les débats sur l’apprentissage tout au long de la vie à l’époque actuelle où les changements peuvent être imprévisibles et fréquents comme l’illustre la pandémie de COVID-19. Malgré le corpus de littérature existant sur « l’apprentissage », peu de recherches ou de connaissances théoriques portent sur le « changement au fil du temps » en tant que dimension de l’apprentissage individuel sur le lieu de travail. On accorde de plus en plus d’importance au développement personnel des individus étant donné qu’ils assument des rôles de médiation essentiels dans les pratiques professionnelles des entreprises. Cet article présente le concept de « l’itinéraire d’apprentissage » pour examiner la complexité relationnelle de la façon dont les individus apprennent dans différents cadres professionnels tout au long de leur vie active. Pour éclairer ce propos, l’article s’appuie sur l’expérience éducative de deux salariés avec des rôles différents, à deux moments différents, sur des lieux de travail différents. L’autrice affirme que l’apprentissage individuel inclut une interaction complexe entre les points de vue, les identités et l’action personnels en matière d’apprentissage. Cette complexité est d’ordre relationnel et liée à la culture de l’apprentissage sur le lieu de travail, ce qui explique la raison pour laquelle apprendre diffère pour les individus en fonction du lieu de travail, et que même pour une seule et même personne apprendre sur son lieu de travail diffère en fonction des postes qu’elle occupe.

Introduction

In today’s precarious global market economy, many countries are under increasing pressure to remain competitive and productive. The impetus to be competitive usually results in changes in work organisation, work structures and the labour market. Many countries promote lifelong workplace learning and encourage innovation as necessary strategies to address these changes (Yorozu 2017 ). Although a corpus of theoretical accounts of learning exists, there has been limited theorisation or discussion of what lifelong workplace learning might entail, especially in this period of uncertainty and disruption, when career progression is less linear than in earlier times (Akkermans et al. 2020 ; Arthur et al. 1999 ).

Drawing on data from a group of in-service vocational teacher trainees enrolled in a one-year training programme run by a local university in Brunei, this article proposes the concept of a “learning journey” to advance our thinking about change over time as a dimension of workplace learning. The article follows a conventional sequence, beginning with a review of the different theoretical perspectives about learning for work to illustrate the hitherto limited emphasis on lifelong workplace learning. This literature review is followed by the research methodology. Two case stories are presented to contextualise the findings, with a discussion considering the interrelationship of individual positions, identity and agency which deepens our understanding of learning throughout working life. The article concludes by underscoring the concept of a “learning journey” to conceptualise the change-over-time dimension of workplace learning as part of individual lifelong learning and the implications of this concept for advancing our thinking on the topic.

Learning for work and lifelong learning

Most countries’ policies and standard practices take an approach to learning for work that focuses on the early stages of a career. For example, initial teacher training and/or teaching practices precede employment as teachers; new doctors need to undergo a period of internship training before entering the profession; and apprentices learn on the job. Once able to perform satisfactorily, they are employed in the job. On a similar note, mature students returning to work are assumed to have completed the necessary training prior to (re-)entering the labour market. This front-loaded model of workplace learning, as the name implies, assumes that all the essential training needed for a lifetime of practice has been completed once the training programme is complete.

There are fundamental issues with the front-loaded model of training for work, which appears poorly aligned with the reality of today’s rapidly changing workplaces. First, proponents of this model tend to assume that initial training for a job will suffice for a lifetime of work practice. Hence, training is usually a one-off event. Second, it is assumed that a given job will last for a substantive part of a person’s life, or that people will stay in one role or job for the whole of their working lives. However, the reality of today’s uncertain economic climate is that changes in work demands, work practices and occupational structures are frequent and unpredictable. This stands in opposition to the front-loaded model, which assumes that the nature of work remains fundamentally unchanged.

Given this gap between models of initial education and the changing realities of work, we need to re-conceptualise workplace learning. Learning for work is no longer a one-off event; rather, it is a lifelong process where the workplace itself is one of the essential sites of learning. This also entails the processes of identity construction and transformation (Van Dellen and Cohen-Scali 2015 ; Filliettaz 2013 , Billett and Somerville 2004 ). Early studies focused on how workers develop their expertise through their ongoing experiences of work. For example, Chris Agyris and Donald Schön ( 1974 , 1978 ) write about how workers reflect on their own work experience to adapt to changing circumstances. Schön ( 1983 , 1987 ) goes on to immortalise the notion of the “reflective practitioner”, focusing on how workers consciously or unconsciously correct their practice in order to develop their expertise. Other writers like Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus ( 1986 ) focus on how workers develop their expertise through ongoing experience at work. Hubert Dreyfus ( 2001 ) later extended this work to emphasise the salient role of informal experiential learning. Victoria Marsick and Karen Watkins’ ( 1990 ) notions of informal learning and incidental learning also contribute to theorising workplace learning. Psychological theories have strongly influenced this body of research.

Following this early thinking, there was a shift of focus from workers themselves to the nature of work practices within the workplace, through which workers learn. This shift is evident in the range of socio-cultural and postmodern theories found in the workplace learning literature. Situated cognition theories (Brown et al. 1989 ), socio-cultural theories like those of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger ( 1991 ), and cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström 1987 , 2001 ) focus on the nature of work practices, which often overlook the individual workers within the workplace. The lack of emphasis on individual workers is a limitation of such theories, which largely draw upon the participation metaphor (Sfard 1998 ) whereby the history, agency and dispositions of individual workers are subsumed within the workplace context. Attempting to reintegrate individuals into social participatory processes, writers like Phil Hodkinson and Heather Hodkinson ( 2004 ) draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ), which views individuals as reciprocal parts of the social contexts in which they learn.

From a different perspective, Stephen Billett and Margarita Pavlova ( 2005 ) highlight how individual subjectivity and agency can help us understand individual engagement and learning through workplace practices. Billett ( 2011 ) argues that some accounts of learning place too much emphasis on social influences. He proposes that individual subjectivity, intentionality and identity are socially shaped over time. These roles contribute to individuals’ cognitive experience and subsequently influence their conceptions of what is later experienced. As Lave succinctly puts it:

There are enormous differences in what and how learners come to shape (or be shaped into) their identities with respect to different practices. … Researchers would have to explore each practice to understand what is being learned, and how (Lave 1996 , pp. 161–162).

This claim signals that it is important not just to study workplace practices, but also to understand how individual positions, dispositions and actions influence the way workers learn through participation in various practices throughout their working life – in other words, change over time. Theories such as Lave and Wenger’s communities of practice and Engeström’s activity theory struggle to provide a well-developed structure for understanding change over time as a dimension of workplace learning. They focus mostly on the learning itself, which takes either a timeless or a thin temporal slice of individual experience rather than a longitudinal perspective, and seldom explores or captures individual changes.

A few longitudinal studies focus on individual learning over a period of time. Martin Bloomer and Phil Hodkinson explored young learners’ dispositions to learning changes over a period of time through engagement in formal education. Based on this study, they developed the concept of “learning careers”, defined as “the development of dispositions to learning over time” (Bloomer and Hodkinson 2000 , p. 590). The concept of “learning careers” continues to be helpful for examining learners’ identities and dispositions for learning in various settings (e.g. Gallacher et al. 2002 ; Crossan et al. 2003 ; and Ecclestone and Pryor 2003 ). Whilst this concept may have currency in understanding changes in learners’ dispositions, it has been revisited by Hodkinson and his colleagues.

Three broad theoretical perspectives underpin the “learning careers” concept. First, the word “career” is used to refer to “any social strand of any person’s course through life” (Goffman 1968 , p. 119), where the strand involves learning. This assumption has been challenged by Phil Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) on the grounds that learning cannot be separable from other aspects of a person’s life, since most learning by an individual has many informal attributes. Second, learning is integral within social practices in any given situation (Lave and Wenger 1991 ), which contradicts the first perspective. It follows that the concept of “learning careers” does not refer to a separate isolated process within the given “location”. Finally, Hodkinson and colleagues draw on Bourdieu’s notion of “dispositions”, which depicts orientations and attitudes towards learning.

In extending the limitations of the concept of “learning careers”, Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) propose the use of “learning lives” rather than “learning careers”. The “learning lives” project aimed to understand the complexities of learning over an individual’s life course (Biesta et al. 2011 ). In agreement with Billett ( 2001 , 2011 ), Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) argue that it is equally important to understand the longitudinal dimension of an individual’s workplace learning within the broader context of their life. They emphasise people’s “learning lives” and see workplace learning as an essential part of these. In other words, they conceptualise workplace learning as part of a person’s wider living and learning throughout their life course. Recognising that living and learning to work run alongside each other as part of lifelong learning (Yorozu 2017 ), the present article aims to take this approach further, and to conceptualise how people learn in workplaces when roles alter or when people change workplaces. In the ever-changing world we live in today, understanding the dynamics of workplace learning is key in pursuing the United Nations fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote] lifelong learning opportunities for all” (UN 2015 , p. 14).

Methodology

This article draws on data from a completed case study of a group of twelve individuals learning to become vocational teachers in Brunei. The central aim of the original study was to understand how a group of in-service teachers learn prior to and during a one-year initial teacher preparation programme at a local university. The case study is framed within an interpretive qualitative framework which operates on the ontological assumption that “truth” or social reality is socially constructed by individuals (Lincoln and Guba 2000 ). As an interpretive researcher, I tried to construct a meaningful story from the participants’ point of view and at the same time maximise the benefits of my own experience and insights. My experience both as a student teacher and as a staff member in the same faculty influenced my pre-assumptions about how individuals learn.

I conducted my study at a local university in Brunei between 2007 and 2008. Ethical approval was granted through appropriate channels. All participants were fully informed of the purpose of my research, what the study entailed and the duration of the study, and each of them provided informed consent for their involvement in the study. Anonymity and confidentiality were assured for all participants of the study, including the use of pseudonyms for respondents’ names. Although I was a staff member in the same Faculty of Education at the time of my study, I was not involved in teaching the particular group of student teachers who participated in my study. In order to challenge my pre-assumptions about what I expected to find, I applied Harry Wolcott’s ( 1994 ) method of transforming qualitative data and Clark Moustakas’s ( 1990 ) heuristic method of analysis, which involves changing the data into something meaningful through immersion. I will return to this in the later part of the methodology section.

The group of twelve in-service teachers who participated in my case study had been teaching for at least one year in a vocational college prior to joining the programme at a local university. 1 During the programme, they returned to their workplaces for their teaching placements. In order to understand their learning journey, I asked participants to recall both their past teaching experiences in workplaces and their experiences during the teacher training programme. Fieldwork involved two rounds of data collection between 2007 and 2008.

Although the case study was carried out some time ago, my concern here is with questions that are not restricted to specific times, policies, or structural arrangements that might well alter considerably over ten or twenty years. One of the strengths of using a case study approach is to facilitate rich conceptual development where existing theories like the theory of learning cultures are brought up against complex realities. The data about the learning of these trainee teachers can help to generate new thinking and ideas. In this study of trainee teachers’ learning, the concept of a “learning journey” emphasises the interrelationship between individuals and learning cultures across their working lives, particularly with reference to the “change-over-time” dimension of their workplace learning. Such change might include the kind of experiences that the individual learners in my study have at each of their workplace settings and their relationship to these workplaces as their roles change.

Data collection

Data collection involved two semi-structured interviews with each participant, one at the beginning and one at the end of the initial teacher preparation programme. The interviews, which were digitally recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim, were conducted in English. They lasted on average 60 minutes and consisted of open-ended questions that focused on participants’ career decisions, learning in their workplaces and learning on the initial teacher preparation programme. In the first round of interviews, I asked participants about their workplace learning retrospectively. They were also asked to share their learning experiences as trainee teachers at their teaching placements, i.e. their workplaces.

The second round of interviews was derived from and informed by the analysis of the first round. These interviews, which lasted on average 60 minutes, included follow-up questions to take the interview to a deeper level by asking for more detail (Rossman and Rallis 2003 ), and also included questions that enabled participants to share their learning experiences from the programme. Due to the limited time frame and resources, I drew my case study data from trainee teachers’ interview data alone, which could be seen as a limitation. However, given the nature of my data and how they were collected, the participants’ perspectives were central to how I made sense of the specific learning cultures of their workplaces and their different roles, which subsequently influenced my analysis of the data. Moreover, I complemented my interview data with key documentation about the teacher training preparation programme. Collecting and analysing this material to provide an understanding of the context also subsequently confirmed my knowledge of the training of vocational teachers.

Data analysis

The process of data collection and data analysis was cyclical. Each stage of data analysis helped to inform the subsequent data collection, which focused on deepening understanding and examining in-depth experiences of the trainee teachers at their workplaces. The analysis of the data involved two stages. The first stage was carried out during the first round of interviews. I approached my interview data with reference to the three-stage process of description, analysis and interpretation to transform qualitative data (Wolcott 1994 ). The process of description involved drawing up individual case stories to obtain an in-depth understanding of each participant’s career decisions and learning in the workplace. I then subjected these stories to re-analysis in the light of data obtained from the second interview.

I also used Moustakas’ ( 1990 ) “heuristic analysis” to make sense of the data through immersion, then standing back and allowing the subconscious to work. Moustakas’ heuristic method provided a framework for guidance and clarification which helped to challenge my pre-assumptions from my own experiences. Sandy Sela-Smith ( 2002 ) acknowledges that this makes Moustakas’ method a valuable tool in the exploration of subjective human experience, especially the experiences of student teachers when they move from one context to another. My own personal experience as a student teacher and a staff member on the teacher training programme acted as a catalyst for inquiry. As Moustakas ( 1990 ) makes clear, the qualities of tacit knowing (Polanyi 1983 ) and intuition are crucial components of heuristic inquiry. Drawing on Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln’s ( 1989 ) version of the “hermeneutic circle”, analysis of the data involved moving between the parts and the whole. Neither of these could be understood without reference to the other, as “meanings c[an] only be understood in relation to a larger whole” (Hollway and Jefferson 2000 ).

Through immersion in the first and second interview transcripts, I wrote up case studies of individual student-teachers’ learning for each participant using a largely descriptive process incorporating significant sections of the original interview data to represent the individual’s own words. The main reason for writing up individual case studies for each participant was not just to produce a story for that individual, but also to understand how they learned to become a vocational teacher through engaging in different learning contexts across their career journey. In the second stage of analysis, I compared the twelve case studies in terms of issues, patterns, commonalities and differences, which is part of Moustakas’ ( 1990 ) heuristic research. The revealed patterns were examined, and themes began to emerge through a rigorous inductive and iterative process. The procedure also involved contextualising the data within a broader theoretical framework in the same research field. Here, the theory of learning cultures based on Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of cultural and other forms of “capital” (Bourdieu 1986 ) provided an overarching framework and a set of “thinking tools” to link the case studies with broader issues.

Revisiting two participants’ learning journeys

In this article, I focus on two individuals, Mary and Phillip, to explore their learning at their workplaces. Mary and Phillip were both training to become vocational teachers, but were, at the time of my study, at different stages of their learning journey, with different roles. These stages include their workplace learning as full-time teachers before enrolling in their teacher training programme (i.e. during their first few years of teaching) and their learning as in-service trainee teachers in their workplaces.

I have chosen Mary’s and Phillip’s stories for a specific reason. Research has shown that worker position, status, and the nature of work can influence individual learning and career development (Billett 2001 ; Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2004 ). This article aims to explore these differences and the individuals’ dispositions towards learning across the different learning cultures in which they participated. My findings show that the interrelationships between positions, identity and agency play a significant role in influencing workplace learning at different stages of becoming a vocational teacher. At the time of my study, Mary and Phillip were both in-service teachers in the early stages of their career, with different career trajectories. Although both had enrolled in the same teacher training programme, their approaches to learning differed. I argue that this difference is due to the interrelationship between individual positions and dispositions to learning and workplace learning cultures.

The following stories are constructed based on the interview data alone. These constructed stories are mine. One might argue that there are always different versions of personal stories that can be constructed (Stronach and MacLure 1997 ). For some researchers of a realist bent (Feuer et al. 2002 ), this might call into question the validity of my findings. My response to such critics is that, with qualitative data like mine, researchers do their best to tell a version of the truth as honestly as possible, and there is no doubt that some uncertainties will remain. Nevertheless, the credibility of the research is strengthened if other researchers working in a similar setting end up with similar stories. The credibility of the research then becomes a matter of coherence, as John Smith argues succinctly:

For interpretive inquiry, the basis of truth or trustworthiness is social agreement; what is judged true or trustworthy is what we can agree, conditioned by time and place, is true or trustworthy (Smith 1984 , p. 386).

Moreover, the findings from this study may also “ring true” in other settings. Readers can judge for themselves whether the analysis presented sounds convincing based on what they know of similar settings. In addition, I have established rigour in my research findings through a coherent methodology, i.e. by using case studies within an interpretive framework. Thus, the rationale for every stage of the methodology is made clear.

The interrelationship between individual positions, identity and agency in workplace learning

In order to contextualise the findings in this section, I will first provide case descriptions of Mary and Phillip to give some sense of “change over time” as a dimension of workplace learning as they change roles at their workplaces. Following this, I use the concepts of position , identity and agency that underpin the proposed “learning journey” to analyse and discuss these case descriptions.

Learning as a new teacher

Mary, a Malay woman, had been employed as a full-time tutor at nursing college. Prior to becoming a nurse tutor, she undertook training in the same nursing college before going overseas to further her studies. Upon graduation, she joined the staff of the college. Initially, she was appointed as a coordinator, a role which she felt she had been appointed to prematurely. Her colleagues, who were also her teachers at that time, had high expectations of her. Because she had a higher degree qualification, they appointed her as a coordinator straight away:

“Their high expectations have thrown me off the board … I wanted them to know that I have limited teaching experience … I didn’t think that I gave an impression that I knew everything, but they thought that being a postgraduate student, I should be knowledgeable. Some colleagues challenged me that way which in a way intimidated me. They would put up their wall …”

Mary had expected to be allocated a mentor who could guide her when she first joined the teaching staff, but she was not given one. She felt lost as she was provided neither with a curriculum nor a formal induction in how to deliver it. Despite this lack of support, she managed to develop her teaching skills through trial and error and chose to teach modules where she felt she could contribute. She also chose to take the initiative to learn from her colleagues:

“I made my initiative to come to some of the colleagues which I considered as a good teacher, to observe how they teach the subjects which I will be teaching. I sat in a few of their classes and I even co-teach with these teachers.” [emphasis added]

She also co-taught with another colleague whom she had the chance to observe before being given some lessons to teach herself. She remembered her first lesson, where she did not know how to begin or which teaching approach to use. However, she was able to draw on her past observations of her colleague, which helped her to continue with the teaching. In addition, she did have the support of a buddy system which consisted of junior tutors who had already been through the teacher training programme. As well as sharing resources, this buddy system allowed them to conduct “cross-teaching”, a new approach whereby all of them collaborated to deliver the curriculum across different levels, instead of just one level of any particular programme.

As a nurse tutor, Mary also had to teach in a clinical setting. She felt she lacked the clinical experience to be able to demonstrate practical knowledge of nursing, as she had not worked as a nurse:

“… my undergraduate degree has prepared me with a lot of practical experience but it is different when you are a nurse in the hospital. I am groomed strongly in theory, but theory is useless if you don’t know the practical side of it, which made me feel deficient.”

Mary therefore did not have a smooth transition into her first year of teaching. Instead, she had to be proactive in building social relationships with her colleagues and finding learning opportunities, since the college itself gave her limited support.

In contrast to Mary’s story, Phillip’s learning trajectory to becoming a vocational teacher went comparatively smoothly. Phillip, a middle-aged Chinese man, decided to go into teaching after working for several years as an engineer abroad. He developed an interest in teaching after mentoring some work-attachment (trainee) students at his engineering workplace. He was eager to join the teacher training programme to equip himself with the appropriate pedagogical skills. When he first joined his college, he saw himself as an engineer and a teacher:

“I see myself as an engineer and a teacher because I think it has to be together. For me you cannot be a good engineering lecturer unless you are also a good engineer in terms of your knowledge … keeping update with what is going in the industry, for example, and know what is happening in the industry is important …”

Due to his previous role as an engineer, Phillip would teach his students in the same way that he made presentations as an engineer to his clients. Unlike Mary, Phillip was allocated an unofficial mentor who helped him transition into his workplace. Phillip’s mentor was helpful and supported Phillip by sharing teaching resources with him. They would discuss different issues, and the mentor would challenge Phillip with difficult tutorial questions. Phillip was also given opportunities to be involved in developing the curriculum. He therefore had a chance to understand the content of each of the programmes.

Learning as a trainee teacher

During her enrolment in the teacher training programme, Mary found it useful to return to her workplace for her teaching placement every Monday to try out different teaching methods that she had learnt in the programme. Phillip was less keen to try out the methods he had learnt in the programme at his placements. Having taught in his college for the past three years, Phillip had already gained knowledge of the teaching approaches which were most useful to teaching his subject, and he was familiar with the type and level of his students. When introduced to new methods of teaching and learning, he therefore decided to continue what he had been doing before entering the programme:

“… I can see the point of using these methods, but I am not so sure whether I want to implement it all as much as [name of university lecturer] would like in my lectures … I will still use my own way of structuring my lesson and will do one for the university.”

Mary found it challenging to switch her role to that of trainee teacher at her workplace every Monday. She had to adjust to her role as a learner and learn to negotiate with her mentor, who was also the headmaster of her college, to observe her teaching. Her colleagues continued to see her as their full-time colleague rather than as someone who still needed time to acquire the full range of skills a teacher possesses. Mary therefore had to learn to be proactive in protecting her role as a learner when on her teacher training programme:

“Most of them view me as a professional colleague … They wanted to give me a lot of hours to teach ... I also need to be very assertive … or else I would end up 100 hours of teaching and top up with what I have to do here [university].” [emphasis added]

Like Mary, Phillip also continued to be seen by his colleagues as their full-time colleague. Unlike Mary, however, he also saw himself as a full-time teacher and continued to perform his role when given the usual administrative duties:

“… we have to supervise projects as well … and for this semester, I have to take on more teaching workload … I am also the timetable coordinator for the department ...”

Phillip had had the same mentor when he first entered teaching. However, he did not entirely follow his mentor’s advice:

“… he is helpful when he has the time. If I ask anything, he will help. He gives a lot of advice, maybe some of it I will use it. Although he has more experience than me, I still disagree with certain things he said … he has got his own points and views about certain things. For example, for assessments, he would do certain things certain ways, I would say ... there is another way of doing it … I find I don’t do everything he does, but I find his advice and guidance very helpful.”

“Learning cultures” and “dispositions”

Mary’s and Phillip’s stories illustrate how they learn at their workplaces with different roles. There is an extensive body of literature which shows how learning is situated. Lave and Wenger suggest that:

learning is not merely situated in practice – as if it were some independently reifiable process that just happened to be located somewhere; learning is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world (Lave and Wenger 1991 , p. 35).

Phil Hodkinson et al. ( 2007b ) prefer to understand the social practices through which people learn as “learning cultures”. Therefore, within any workplace, a learning culture exists. It follows that participation in different learning cultures will influence individuals’ lives differently (Biesta et al. 2011 ). What is equally important is the position of individuals in these workplace learning cultures, as these influence the way they perceive their work practices. Put another way, individuals have subjective perceptions called dispositions which are located within their objective positions. Dispositions are more than schemata of perceptions or beliefs. Rather, these perceptions derive from and are part of the whole person. Bourdieu uses the term “habitus” to capture all this, defined as a battery of dispositions accumulated through ongoing life experiences that are durable and transposable (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ). Individual positions influence learning in many ways. For example, social positions can be historical and geographical, or situated within particular learning cultures (see Hodkinson et al. 2008 ).

When Mary first joined her teaching job, she was in a better position than other newcomers like Phillip since she had herself once been a student of this college, i.e. her new workplace. She knew many of the lecturers, and was able to draw on her own student experiences to inform her teaching. In Bourdieu’s terms, she had both cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1986 ). Cultural capital is defined as the amount of knowledge relative to the learning culture. It is deemed valuable, since it usually determines whether a person will succeed (ibid.). Social capital is an individual’s network of relations with other people (ibid.).

Legitimate peripheral participation vs. being thrown in at the deep end

As a newcomer, Mary would normally be positioned at the periphery of the workplace community of practice and gradually learn the ropes before being given full responsibility for a task. Lave and Wenger ( 1991 ) refer to this as “legitimate peripheral participation”. Instead, she was thrown in at the deep end, like the teachers in Colin Lacey’s ( 1977 ) study. She was given limited support and no mentor, yet was expected to take on full responsibility. Her accrued cultural capital in terms of her subject knowledge and social capital from her student years did not help her to learn as a newcomer. They may even have created a barrier to her learning opportunities. Elsewhere (Goh and Zukas 2016 ) a co-author and myself have reported similar findings, which contradict Bourdieu, who states that having cultural capital makes one likely to succeed in the relevant field (Bourdieu 1986 ). We argue that cultural capital is not the only aspect that should be considered when trying to understand how individuals learn in a learning context (see also Goh 2014 ). Mary’s story clearly shows the opposite. In hindsight, it is worth noting that Lave and Wenger ( 1991 ) did not address the issue of newcomers having to take on full responsibility without being allowed to experience the process of legitimate peripheral participation. Mary’s story shows that newcomers are not always necessarily positioned at the periphery of a community of practice.

It is similarly worth noting that Hodkinson et al. ( 2007b ) did not explicitly discuss how individuals manage the transition from newcomer to full member in such a short timescale within a learning culture. The lack of time for this transition requires individuals to adapt quickly to the new role and the level of responsibility that comes with it. Mary’s account of her learning is similar to what Miriam Zukas and Sue Kilminster ( 2012 ) call the “critical intensive learning period”. This occurs when individuals are not treated as newcomers when transitioning to new areas of work and responsibilities, but are instead “thrown in at the deep end” and expected to be experts and act with full responsibility. Similarly, Hodkinson and Hodkinson’s research study ( 2003 , 2004 ) showed that when an experienced teacher changed to a new job, they were expected to be an expert from the outset. Unlike Mary, Phillip, who was positioned at the periphery and who lacked cultural and social capital in relation to his workplace, had a smooth transition into becoming a teacher with the support of his mentor.

Identity and changing roles

Due to Mary’s ambiguous position in relation to her workplace, she had a difficult transition period from learning as a new teacher to learning as a trainee teacher compared to Phillip. Within the literature, there is limited understanding of how the change of positions in relation to the workplace influences individuals’ learning. What emerges strongly from these two stories is that change over time through learning within the workplace is influenced by the change of roles from teacher to trainee teacher. Subsequently, the extent of this influence on individuals’ dispositions to learn depends on the tension between their “self-identity” (how they see themselves in relation to the situation) and how they exercise their agency when colleagues continue to see them as full-time teachers. Mary’s story reveals a marked tension between her “self-identity” and how she was viewed by her colleagues, which compelled her to exercise her agency to protect her learner status.

Identity can also be defined as a person’s disposition about themselves (Biesta et al. 2011 ). Defining it in this way allows us to think of identity as more than a cognitive concept, since most of the time we cannot articulate clearly who we are, and even if we are and do, much is left out. That is, our accumulated dispositions add up to more than how we think of ourselves. At the same time, how we see ourselves underpins many of our dispositions towards life.

The stories of Mary and Phillip illustrate the influence of early-career vocational teachers’ dual identities (Fejes and Köpsén 2014 ) on their learning journey. Phillip saw himself as an engineer as well as a teacher. He recognised the need to learn to teach whilst still keeping his vocational skills up to date with developments in the industry. Similarly, Mary stressed the importance of equipping herself with clinical skills, since these reflected upon her credibility as a nurse tutor. Mary saw herself as a nurse tutor much of the time, but she never explicitly talked about how her clinical nursing knowledge influenced her teaching. Mary talked on several occasions about teaching her students the importance of emotional care and the subtleties of caring for older patients. This illustrates the overlap between an individual’s identity and the roles they are called on to play. How individuals see themselves is linked to their roles in the workplace. The stories in this article show that it is important to understand both how newcomers view themselves and the expectations placed on them by other people in their role as new workers in the workplace, which tends to be overlooked in the literature.

Coping strategies

Mary and Phillip were both able to shape their responses to the situations they encountered in their workplaces in different ways. They responded differently based on the relationship between how they saw their own roles in their workplaces and how others saw them. Mary comes across as a very strong-willed person. She struggled to maintain her role due to the tensions between her identity and her position within the learning culture. As discussed earlier on, tensions arose when she saw herself as a new teacher, but her colleagues viewed her as an expert. Her colleagues had high expectations of her capability and therefore gave her minimal support in learning to teach. She was thus obliged to construct learning relationships (Goh 2013 ) with her “buddies” which allowed her to learn to teach by “cross-teaching” with them. Tensions also arose when Mary saw herself as a trainee teacher, but her colleagues viewed her as a full-time teacher. She had to be proactive in keeping her learner status in order to be able to learn in her workplace. These tensions were difficult to reconcile. They resulted in Mary having to exercise her agency in constructing or reshaping her work role and identity.

In Phillip’s story, there are several examples of tensions between his identity and his position when he returned to his workplace as a trainee teacher. Unlike Mary, Phillip saw himself as a teacher and was viewed as such by his colleagues, who gave him administrative tasks. He managed his tensions differently to Mary by being proactive in taking up these tasks. His actions and dispositions can be described as “strategic compliance” in satisfying the needs of his workplace. Phillip also exercised his agency when writing two sets of lesson plans: one to satisfy the university programme’s requirements and another reflecting the way he had been teaching prior to enrolling on the programme. Tensions arose when there was disagreement between Phillip and his mentor regarding teaching methods. In these instances Phillip was seen to be taking control of his learning.

As Mary and Phillip transitioned to a different level of work and responsibility involving a change of roles over time, they were required to practise some degree of agency in “negotiating their identity positions” (Eteläpelto et al. 2013 , 2014 ; Vähäsantanen and Eteläpelto 2009 , 2011 ; Goh 2013 ) in order to change work practices. This requirement creates differences in individuals’ dispositions to learning in their respective workplaces even among people with the same status of trainee teacher. Put simply, the difference in individuals’ learning results from the interrelationship between three concepts: position, identity and agency . Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische ( 1998 , p. 971) argue that agency is the “capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations”. Drawing on this idea, Gert Biesta and Michael Tedder see agency as “the ability to exert control over and give direction to one’s life” (Biesta and Tedder 2007 , p. 135). Biesta et al. ( 2011 ) argue that agency is the individual’s ability to change parts of their dispositions and/or their positions. The stories of Mary and Phillip clearly show that the variation in the exercise of agency depends on an individual’s identities, professional competence and relations to other professionals in the workplace (Vähäsantanen et al. 2009 ; Kersh 2015 ). In circumstances like those of Mary and Phillip where work roles and identity are not clearly defined for other workers, individuals need to exercise agency to establish their own professional identities (Eteläpelto et al. 2013 ). An individual’s agentic actions are akin to striving for distinction in order to survive and be successful (Bourdieu 1984 ).

The “learning journey”: the interrelationship between individuals and workplace learning cultures

The change-over-time dimension of workplace learning is seen when individuals change workplaces or change their roles within the same workplace over a period of time, which usually results in a change of work practices. Mary’s and Phillip’s stories illustrate that the interrelationship between individual positions, agency and identity is paramount to understanding an individual’s lifelong workplace learning. When Mary and Phillip changed roles within their workplaces, their positions changed in relation to their workplaces’ learning cultures. To cope with this, they were then required to exercise their agency which was largely tied to their identities. These findings concur with the argument of Anneli Eteläpelto et al. ( 2013 ) that in order to construct meaningful life courses we should focus on how individuals negotiate agency in work and life. To develop a robust conceptualisation of lifelong workplace learning, we need to explore the learning cultures of the different workplaces in which individuals participate. Learning can only be understood through the interrelationship of the learning cultures of workplaces and individuals.

At all levels, there is a complex interaction between individual dispositions and identity on the one hand, and individual positions in a range of workplaces on the other, each with its own learning culture. When the roles of Mary and Phillip changed from teacher to trainee teacher, the learning cultures within their workplaces also shifted. Their stories illustrate the importance of individual positions and dispositions in relation to practices within the workplace (Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2004 ; Goh 2021 ). This study also reconfirms Hodkinson’s concepts of “learning careers” and “learning lives”, since it shows that individuals’ dispositions to learning can develop and change over time through interaction with different learning cultures across the lifespan. Simultaneously, learning cultures within the workplace can change over time, which often results in either continuity or changes in practices.

Mary’s and Phillip’s actions and dispositions to learning exist in relation to many other factors which influence the learning cultures of their workplaces. Their learning was also dependent on and shaped by workplace affordances , which are constituted by workplace hierarchies, contestation and personal relations (Billett 2001 ). On the other hand, the learning opportunities that an individual can see in their workplace are limited by the position they occupy and the horizons that are visible from that position. Hodkinson et al. prefer to describe this as an individual’s “horizon of learning”. That is,

… in any situation there are opportunities to learn. What those opportunities are, and the ways in which the process of learning takes place, depends on the nature of the learning culture and of the position, habitus and capitals of the individuals, in interaction with each other in their horizons for learning, as part of a field of relationships (Hodkinson et al. 2008 , p. 41).

This process, a kind of “learning to become”, also depends on the individual’s receptiveness and the extent to which s/he is able to recognise the learning support available from others, in order to maintain individual engagement with the activities for continuing development. When tensions surfaced, Mary was able to leverage her buddy system to learn to teach. Anne Edwards ( 2015 ) calls this “relational agency”, referring to individuals’ capacity to be receptive and engage with others as resources.

Learning as becoming

Mary’s and Phillip’s learning to “become” involved a change in roles within the same workplace. They needed to (re)negotiate their identities in different circumstances, which depended partly on how their colleagues saw them and partly on how they themselves saw their changing roles. Lesley Scanlon ( 2011 ) argues that the process of “becoming” involves individuals rehearsing their “possible or provisional selves” (Ibarra 1999 ). In line with other scholars (Billett 2011 ; Harteis and Goller 2014 ; Vähäsantanen et al. 2017 ), the stories of Mary and Phillip highlight that individual agency is crucial in the formation of individuals’ learning and the development of professional identities where learning and practice are relational (Billett 2010 ).

Given the complexity of the interrelationship between individuals and their context, individuals’ lifelong workplace learning can be viewed as a journey, which considers individuals’ learning as becoming through participating in different learning cultures longitudinally throughout the entire length of their life. Mary and Phillip continued to learn throughout their working life, and thus continued to “become”. This process of “learning to become” can be one of change or of continuity, depending on the individual’s changing roles and positions. Individuals are always “becoming” through continuous learning experiences which become a part of them (Jarvis 2007 ), and which either reinforce or change their dispositions. This study shows that individuals learn to become through exercising their agency in different ways, either changing or reinforcing their practices in the workplace. This in turn illustrates that individuals can only learn to become through participating in the practices within their learning cultures.

The concept of a “learning journey” is useful in researching individuals’ change over time as a dimension of workplace learning, which involves either a change of workplaces or a change of role within the workplace. A learning journey highlights the significance of the interrelationship between individual dispositions and ever-changing learning contexts (in this case, Mary’s and Phillip’s different workplaces). The learning journey considers the complex interrelationships between individual agency, positions and identity, which vary between individuals, at different times and in different situations. This highlights the need for lifelong learning policies to consider individual responsibility for learning and workplace affordances (Billett 2001 ), while also taking account of the necessity of informal learning (Marsick and Watkins 1990 ).

The concept of a “learning journey” addresses the limitations of existing workplace learning theories which overlook the perspectives of either the individual learner or the workplaces. It does this by signifying the importance of individual learners and their habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ) where learning is embodied, rather than simplistically trying to understand learning by looking only at the work practices within a work organisation. The concept of a “learning journey” is timely since it helps us to reconsider change over time as a dimension of workplace learning, in ways which look beyond the traditional linear career progression in this unpredictable postmodern era. It brings a fresh perspective on how individual lifelong workplace learning can be supported through unprecedented and disruptive events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

is a Senior Assistant Professor at the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She completed her PhD at the Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Leeds, UK, and was previously appointed as an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Her background as an adult educator has entailed engagement with professionals in education, healthcare and other professional sectors. Her research interests include workplace learning, adult education, teacher education, professional learning and lifelong learning.

1 The method I used to recruit participants was based on practical and pragmatic guidelines such as being accessible; willing to be interviewed during the time allocated to them and representing different vocational teaching areas.

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After five seasons,  Star Trek: Discovery , the show that launched the new set of shows in the franchise to continue its long legacy, will be ending.

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Culber’s journey has been a wild one. Season 2 alone…

Wilson Cruz: Epic. I didn’t know what I was signing up for because the first season I’m there, Dr. Culber’s definitely on the periphery. If anything, he’s Stamet’s [ Anthony Rapp ] partner. We don’t really get to know him until Season 2, which is due to the fact that he’s killed. [ Laughs ] But welcome to Star Trek ! It was literally a rebirth. What excited me about that was when I tried to find a way in, his entire journey has been about creating the life that he deserves, that he feels he deserves, about coming out from Stamet’s shadow because Stamets is such a genius. He created the spore drive. He’s done this incredible research that is universe-changing to be able to travel within an instant to anywhere in the universe. And so he’s the supportive spouse in many ways.

I think when he’s killed and comes back, it forces him to take ownership of his life and say, “Hey, I’m a genius, too. I have something to offer as well.” So much of it was inspired by people in my own life who in the ‘90s were diagnosed with HIV and AIDS and went out and spent their entire life savings, their life insurance money, and traveled the world because they were told that they were going to die in a few years. Then suddenly these new drugs came out, and they were literally given a second lease on life. Many of them found themselves in a position where they were like, “Oh, I get to live. How much of this life still works for me? Do I love the job that I have? Do I love the person I’m with? Are there things that I always wanted to do that I never thought I could or would have the chance to do that I now should pursue?”

So much about that second season especially was about deciding, “Do I want to continue in this relationship? Do I want to be in the shadow of this amazing man forever? Is this a kind of relationship where I will be allowed to become my best self? Do I want to be a doctor anymore?” Even in Season 3, he decides, “Yeah, I do want to be a doctor, but I also have something else to offer. My experience, my relationship to the crew members actually allows me to be a pretty great counselor. I’m a great listener.” He identifies his strengths and builds on them. He takes more risks. He goes on these missions that really put him out there and test him. That has been really fun to play, this person who is creating his life in the moment.

Michael Gibson/CBS

But everyone on this series has been given in one way or another, a second chance in some way. … The whole series is really about fulfilling your potential, whatever you think that’s supposed to be, not necessarily being dictated by someone else or old plans that you might’ve created for yourself as a young person. It’s about owning yourself. Discovering yourself even. [ Laughs ]

I feel like we’re seeing that in Culber now.

Yeah, I think Season 5 is really — We didn’t know that this was our final season. So it’s also really fascinating to me to think about this in terms of what would’ve happened after this. But this was the final piece for him to finally take real ownership over what he believes. This season is really about asking the biggest question of them all, and it’s existential, and there’s no answer for it. And for a scientist like him, it could be maddening, but being okay with the unknown, being okay with not knowing the answer to everything is the final piece, I think, in his development after the murder and coming back to life. So I think at the end of Season 5, there’s a real sense of wholeness.

You said you didn’t know the series was ending, so how has it been saying goodbye to Culber and the series?

It’s the longest job I’ve ever had. I have been the one-season wonder to the point where I would show up on set, and I’m sure that people would be like, “Ooh, I should start saving my money.” [ Laughs ] But it was hard, I’m not going to lie to you, when we found out. Because we finished filming in November, and I think the call came in January or February. We were all put on a call together, and I lost it. I think I took it the hardest. In that same call, they explained they were going to come back and film some additional scenes that we were fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to do to close the series. But I had already taken a job and it was taking me out of the country to Thailand and they were doing these scenes at the exact same time.

So through the magic of television and special effects, I am at the end. It’s not like Culber doesn’t show up, but I could not be there physically. So all of that to say that my goodbye tour really started when we were all at SXSW to see everybody again. The other thing I should add is I was literally filming in Thailand, sweating. And when they were all in Toronto, I was well aware that those were the dates and I was in between scenes and Sonequa [Martin-Green] and the entire cast called me on FaceTime. They clapped everybody out and they clapped me out on FaceTime. I had just gotten my makeup done for this scene, and between that and all of the humidity and the sweat, I had to go back to makeup. [ Laughs ] But it was really sweet of them. And really, that’s who we are to each other. So I got to say goodbye that way.

And it’s Star Trek , so you never know. The cast of Next Gen just did a whole new season on Picard together. So I have a feeling in some form or another, somewhere down the line, I may see Culber again. I hope and I pray, and maybe as I get older, they’ll loosen the white uniform so that I don’t have to be so body conscious. [ Laughs ]

Marni Grossman / Paramount+

There are still other Star Trek series, which have Discovery to thank because Discovery launched this new set of shows…

You’re welcome.

Is there one that you would want to show up on?

I think everybody wants to be animated. That would be hilarious and fun. There’s a new Starfleet Academy series that’s in development that’s starting soon. So if it’s possible for me to show up on there, I absolutely would do that. Listen, everybody knows I have not made a secret of the fact that I was very upset that Strange New Worlds got to do a musical episode and we didn’t, since we have been begging for that opportunity since day one. I mean, Anthony Rapp and myself?

… So if they’re going to be the musical show, then I would absolutely be happy to be reunited with Anson Mount , who, by the way, when he was the captain of our ship, we actually did one scene together and it never showed up on screen. … Because in Season 2, I had my own [arc]. It’s so great. Someone actually took all of the Culber scenes out of Season 2 and just made one short film out of it. It’s pretty amazing, I have to tell you.

So what was in that scene?

It was him welcoming — Actually, you know what, there is one scene we’re in together, but it’s a group scene. So he was telling me that he needed me to come back sooner than I expected, and I was wrapping my brain around it. I do remember I had that really great blue suit on during the scene.

What kind of role do you want to do next?

I think every actor out there knows right now it’s slim pickings, the pilot season that didn’t happen, so that’s a good question. I want to work. I love an ensemble cast. There is a project that I’m developing on my own. I’m executive producing a documentary series right now about LGBTQ youth.

'Star Trek: Discovery' Stars Tease How Series Ends for Their Characters

But it’s going to be hard to top this because the thing about Discovery was that it was sci-fi, but it was also this ensemble cast. It was emotionally based. It was the kind of sci-fi that really allowed for character development in a way that I can’t remember on sci-fi. So I am open. My career has surprised me at every turn.

I’m also open to coming back to Broadway. I would love to be back on stage. It’s why I’m back in New York. I’ve been looking for the right project to come back with. So I am a free agent and I am open to whatever the universe has prepared for me.

The emotion is what makes Trek stand out from sci-fi shows because it’s so much about heart in all of the characters.

It’s about family, it’s about team building, right? I say this all the time: This series centered characters who in most other series would be on the periphery. We are brown and Black and LGBTQ, and those people never get to be the heroes of their own stories. I think our legacy in the end will be that these amazing, rich, complex characters of color who are queer in some cases got to be in the center of the story, got to be the protagonists, and got to be the heroes that we all are capable of being. And to inspire that in a new generation of young people who can learn how to become part of a team and excel in it and take risks is our legacy.

Would you want to do another multi-season series regular role, like Discovery ?

Absolutely. I love TV. I grew up on it. I’m a fan. I watch a lot of it. My job really is about, for me, not the job that people think they’re giving me, but when I take on a role, when I start that job, I think about where I want them to end up. And so the fun part for me is discovering how I get there. Who do I want this person to be when I’m done? This is one of the few times that I’ve been allowed to really see someone all the way through. I didn’t know that Rickie Vasquez and My So-Called Life was going to be one season. By the way, it was 30 years ago this year. I do think about his trajectory in that one season and how I had kind of planned it out with [creator] Winnie [Holzman]. And I think about Dr. Culber and how far he has come and how they were completely different people when you said goodbye to them than they were when you said hello to them, that they were more complex and different versions of themselves. And that’s my job. TV allows you for that long arc and to do it step by step in a way that a film, which captures a moment, sometimes a brief moment in a person’s life, doesn’t allow.

Star Trek: Discovery , Fifth and Final Season Premiere, Thursday, April 4, Paramount+

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Star Trek: Discovery

Wilson cruz.