In vocational education, students learn in different school-based and workplace-based learning environments and engage with different types of knowledge in these environments. Students are expected to integrate these experiences and make meaning of them in relation to their own professional knowledge base. This study focuses both on…

Unlike their counterparts on school-based Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes, 'newly qualified' teachers in further education in England do not have the entitlement to support conferred by Newly Qualified Teacher (NQT) status. Yet there is an expectation that ITE providers support former trainees' progress in employment, with little…

Contemporary accounts of learning emphasise the importance of immediate social partners such as teachers and co-workers. Yet, much of our learning for work occurs without such experts. This paper provides an understanding of how and why new home care workers use scaffolding to learn and enact safe manual handling techniques in their workplaces,…

This article presents an interview with Kulvarn Atwal, headteacher at a primary school in London. Mr. Atwal discusses the challenges of post-graduate study and the impact of his studies on his professional practice. He explains how he discovered workplace learning theories and communities of practice during his studies and how he incorporated…

Purpose: This paper aims to provide an overview of the development of learning organization concepts from the perspective of Dr. Michael Marquardt and presents an interesting evolution of his work spanning three decades in the learning organization field. Design/methodology/approach: Through a conversation with a thought-leading scholar, Dr.…

Purpose: The study aims to examine the issues relating to workplace learning at the upper secondary school level. This study is based on the two questions. How should the professional/peer-learning community or PLC be developed and deployed to help strengthen in-service teacher training? The second question is what are the success factors which…

The aim of this study was to investigate the work-based internship experiences of eight student-coaches. This was particularly in terms of what precisely such coaches learned within the practical context, and how they engaged with unexpected situational events. The methods employed within the project included focus group interviews and participant…

Emerging research on implicit bias recognition and management within health professions describes individually focused educational interventions without considering workplace influences. Workplace learning theories highlight how individual agency and workplace structures dynamically interact to produce change within individuals and learning…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse if open courses, including massive open online courses (MOOCs), can be used as professional development despite their openness since the openness not only brings together individuals from different organizations but also may make the results of collaboration public. Design/methodology/approach: The…

This paper addresses the question to what extent the strong positive correlation between education and training can be attributed to differences in individual-, job- and firm-specific characteristics. The novelty of this paper is to analyze previously unconsidered characteristics, in particular, job tasks and firm-fixed effects. The results show…

Informal workplace learning has become a prominent reality in the knowledge society of today. For this reason, developing appropriate learning conditions in order to enhance workplace learning is dominating organizational agendas. However, research that investigates the relationship between important learning conditions and learning outcomes…

Emotion characterises learners' feedback experiences. While the failure-to-fail literature suggests that emotion may be important, little is known about the role of emotion for educators. Secondary analyses were therefore conducted on data exploring 110 trainers' and trainees' feedback experiences. Group and individual narrative interviews were…

Work-integrated learning programmes help students acquire professional acumen and provide opportunities for them to experiment with new aspects of self and identity. Twelve internship students were interviewed regarding their perspectives on how they think they learn about professionalism and the information sources they use. They describe how…

This article focuses on the perceived freedom of Dutch employees to embark on workplace learning in terms of whether they feel it is "voluntary" or "compulsory". The paper is based on the findings of a large international explorative survey carried out by the Workplace Learning (WPL) Research Network (RN2) of the Asia-Europe…

Professionalism is not easily defined for newcomers to the workforce. While much of the work-ready research focuses on desired graduate attributes and skills, the larger issue is the ways in which students conceptualize professionalism from their observations and experiences of others, and how these conceptualizations affect their professional…