ABSTRACT

Many of the respondents inclined to play down the value of formal course provision in comparison with the learning undertaken on their own initiative as part of the natural ebb and flow of their professional lives. The apparently similar emphasis on learning by seeing in medicine stems from a different source: as so often, the distinction lies in the contrasting characteristics of the professions concerned. Cognate activities may be useful to consider how significant a role informal learning can play in professional life, how it relates to the familiar distinction between theory and practice, how far it is susceptible to planning, and how far it takes an explicit as against a tacit form. As with the strategies for informal learning, those which can appropriately be labelled as interpersonal activities have a number of cognate but analytically distinguishable components. Many of the interpersonal activities described by respondents involved some fairly regular contact between members of different practices.