ABSTRACT
The contemporary workplace has increasingly been identified as a very important learning setting. Whether it is from the perspective of human capital theory or related to advances in technology and the associated importance of information and symbolic analysis (Castells 1999, Reich 1991), the workforce’s capacity to increase its productivity by means of learning has become a central issue of policy and practice. These changes in the commercial evaluation of workers’ learning have occurred at the same time as a shift in practice, in the UK at least, from traditional apprenticeship towards a less clear idea of lifelong learning. We may define apprenticeship as an initiation into an area of work in which the apprentice may hope to become an expert, often in a specified length of time. A capacity for lifelong learning, on the other hand, is a goal that required the workers to learn how they could continuously update their skills and knowledge. For this they needed a more generalised and autonomous expertise as a learner. With this shift comes also a move away from focusing on the formal provision of training by the employers, to the less formal learning practices in which people engage because of their own interests, and a recognition that people do not simply want to learn what is designated as training for the immediate job in hand. Increased importance is placed on informal methods of learning and the ways in which the workers teach themselves to participate in the workplace.
