ABSTRACT
Among all the misconceptions about human resource development, one of the most persistent and obfuscating ones is the idea that HRD practitioners are the core actors on the learning and performance stage (Van der Krogt, 2002). Although it is common nowadays to assert that employees are self-responsible for their own learning and careers, with their managers in a coaching role, in practice HRD professionals still spend most of their time co-ordinating, designing and delivering training to employees (Hytönen et al., 2002; Tjepkema et al., 2002; Nijhof, 2004). There is little evidence to suggest that managers are enthusiastically taking on new roles supporting employee learning or that employees are engaging in completely new ways of self-directed learning. It is often forgotten that employees and managers have always been involved in learning at the workplace, much more so than HRD practitioners ever have. Only in the past ten years has attention in HRD literature been targeted (anew) to implicit and self-directed learning processes occurring within work environments. Before that, until the mid-1990s, HRD was really about training, about trainers, and about what trainers could do to improve the transfer of training (Broad and Newstrom, 1992). At first, the workplace was regarded as the site where employees applied what they had learned in a training setting (Robinson and Robinson, 1989). Later, the focus shifted and the workplace came to be seen as an important learning environment in its own right (Simons and Streumer, 2004).
