ABSTRACT
Businesses are spending an increasing amount of money on learning and development of their own workforce as people are increasingly seen as the primary source of effectiveness and enduring competitive advantage. Government agencies are also increasing the amount of money and attention to relevant learning issues around the development of preparing youth for jobs and helping displaced workers to more fully utilize their talents in the workforce. Facilitating learning within industries, within societies, and across global domains requires taking an integrated approach. This chapter examines learning at a more macro level than the other chapters. The first section of this chapter describes what it means to be a learning organization whereby learning is viewed as a core organizational value. This leads to describing conceptually what it means to be a learning organization as well as key characteristics that have been identified and studied. The second section presents different organizational models and strategic approaches in order to build a learning organization. These approaches include the development of corporate universities, communities of practice and knowledge management systems. The role of chief learning officer in organizations is also described. The third section of the chapter examines the learning implications for meeting dual societal goals of developing and maintaining a competitive workforce in our global economy and enhancing the quality of life for individuals within one’s society. The learning implications include efforts to increase workforce readiness, skill upgrading, and learning efforts to facilitate reemployment. The chapter ends with a discussion of issues of fairness and opportunity.
