ABSTRACT
During the 1990s ‘workplace learning’, ‘work-based learning’ and the like became popular slogans in the context of vocationally oriented education and personnel development. Historically there has been a clear tendency for increasingly larger parts of qualification being transferred from the workplaces to formalized types of school, education and course activity, as working life and the rest of society gradually have become more and more complex. There would seem to be many good arguments for the idea of workplace learning from the point of view of learning theory, efficiency and democracy. The chapter discusses workplace learning in relation to different theoretical approaches and points out some basic features that must be considered. It examines learning in working life to the concept of competence development, which seems to be the kind of learning that is especially intended or hoped for in this connection.
