Learning in small- and medium-sized enterprises: time for a reappraisal?

Research in Post-Compulsory Education, Volume 9, Number 1, 2004

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Learning in Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises: time for a reappraisal?

KEITH FORRESTER University of Leeds, United Kingdom JOHN PAYNE Lifelong Learning Researcher and Writer CILLA ROSS University of Leeds, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This article follows Engeström (2001) in suggesting a new approach to learning in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) based on the social and cultural realities of the workplace. The article briefly reviews the theoretical status and practical standing of work on lifelong learning in SMEs, and suggests that Engeström’s work may help us to understand the complex interplay of formal and informal learning with other features of the workplace. Most of the article is taken up with a case study of learning in one English sub-region that has experienced substantial social and economic change in recent years, and explores the views of a variety of social actors positioned at different points within the workplace. The article concludes that a reappraisal of learning in SMEs should include policy areas such as further education, workforce development and lifelong learning, and be informed by contemporary learning theory.

Introduction

Yrjo’s Engeström’s research, which is now becoming more widely known in the United Kingdom (Engeström, 2001; Young, 2001), is a call to the reappraisal of the approaches to lifelong learning in smaller firms (SMEs) adopted in recent years. These approaches have broadly taken for granted in an unproblematic way:

• that employers know what they want their employees to learn; • that there are ‘transmission’ problems related to a variety of structural

features such as the availability of funding for industrial training, the availability of relevant training courses in the private and public sectors, and negative attitudes towards training on the part of a substantial number of employees.

Keith Forrester et al

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A more sophisticated approach, although one that is still primarily concerned with formal training (and related educational courses), is that of Senker (2002). He locates learning within the process of establishing and consolidating SMEs, and the knowledge demands contained therein:

The acquisition of knowledge by firms is a complex process, however, and it is necessary to draw a sharp distinction between individual learning and organisational learning. It is not sufficient for a firm to access useful knowledge. It has also to organize methods for the internal diffusion of new knowledge, to ensure that knowledge that is received from external sources is communicated and utilized effectively throughout the organization. (Senker, 2002, p. 132)

In relation to the recruitment by smaller firms of well-educated new employees (e.g. graduates), he questions whether jobs are being changed to ‘permit the use of the additional skills and knowledge’ (Senker, 2002, p. 134). Of particular relevance to the present case-study is his argument that:

Particularly in less prosperous regions, one of the principal problems detracting from the United Kingdom’s competitiveness is the failure of SMEs in traditional industries to modernize their products and processes by using new technology. The vast majority of training programmes operate by increasing the supply of suitably educated and trained people, but the failure of SMEs to demand highly qualified workers is of equal significance to their competitiveness. (Senker, 2002, p. 138)

The present article presents an extended case study of firms and employees in one English sub-region (South Yorkshire). This region has seen a decline over the last 25 years of the once powerful steel industry that dominated the local economy. The downside of this has been unemployment and community dislocation. Yet it has also provided the opportunity and the funding (much of it through the European Social Fund) to link lifelong learning to economic regeneration through substantial retraining schemes. The research informing the discussion in this article of conceptions and practices of learning within SMEs was part of a 3-year collaborative research and development project with the iron and steel trade union (ISTC). Both partners were interested in aspects of workplace learning and were keen to explore the situation within the growing number of SMEs that were accompanying the decline of large plants within the British iron and steel industry.

Of the voices raised against a simplistic approach to workplace learning, Keep (2002) has insistently reminded us that training is only one part of learning at work and that learning at work is only one of the factors that might be said to determine economic performance. Tang & Cheung (1996) have emphasised the inadequacy of a behavioural model of industrial training in the USA context. Lloyd & Payne have argued that labour process, state action and

LEARNING IN SMALL- AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISES

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the work of ‘agents of change’ all need to be taken into account in making international comparisons and formulating national policies for learning at work:

Attention has been focused on the institutional linkages between government agencies, the education and training system, labour market regulation, employment structures, and systems of finance and industrial relations that make up distinctive ‘national business systems’, and help shape the dominant growth or skill trajectory of a particular country. (Lloyd & Payne, 2002, p. 384)

Coffield, in criticising the way that informal learning is ignored in United Kingdom lifelong learning policy, stated:

Informal learning should no longer be regarded as an inferior form of learning whose main purpose is to act as the precursor of formal learning; it needs to be seen as fundamental, necessary and valuable in its own right, at times directly relevant to employment and at other times not relevant at all. (Coffield, 2000, p. 8)

Yet informal learning continues to be ignored, a very recent example being the 2002 policy statement, Success for All (Department for Education and Skills [DfES], 2002). By contrast, Raffo et al (2000) used the term situated learning to articulate the informal learning taking place in SMEs in the cultural industries. A closely argued article by Evans & Rainbird (2002) has emphasised that the basis of workplace learning, as understood in policy discourse, is ideological. They point to the need for a better theoretical understanding of the field, an appreciation of the significance of situated learning and the importance of the workplace as a site of broader lifelong learning that has a social significance beyond the workplace.

It is in this context of concern about the theoretical status and practical standing of workplace learning that Engeström (2001) has encouraged an approach to learning at work that involves seeking complex answers to relatively simple, naturalistic questions. The approach is based on activity theory (Engeström, 1996), which proposes that individual and group actions are embedded in a complex system of division of labour, rules and community. He proposes four sets of questions that together form the theoretical territory of ‘expansive learning’. These can be summarised as:

1. Who are the subjects of learning, how are they defined and located? 2. Why do they learn, what makes them make the effort? 3. What do they learn, what are the contents and outcomes of learning? 4. How do they learn, what are the key actions or processes of learning?

These four sets of questions are based in turn on five principles:


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1. The activity system has a collective basis such that ‘Goal-directed individual and group actions ... are relatively independent but subordinate units of analysis’.

2. ‘An activity system is always a community of multiple points of view, traditions and interests’.

3. ‘Activity systems take shape and get transformed over lengthy periods of time’.

4. Contradictions are a central source of change and development. 5. There is expansive transformation over time in activity systems (Engeström,

2001, pp. 136-137).

Such an approach fits well with a naturalistic case-study approach, in which the experiences and views of employees are foregrounded, but also seen as part of cultural formations located and contexted by social class, technological change, and workplace cultures and ideologies. In this case-study, however, the ‘what’ is taken with the ‘how’. The principles informing the four sets of questions mentioned above are implicit in the discourse of the employees interviewed. Engeström’s four questions will be used to structure the discussion in the article of learning in SMEs within South Yorkshire.

Methodology

As mentioned above, the data reported upon in this article were collected as part of a collaborative project between ourselves and the iron and steel trade union. As part of its exploration of ‘community unionism’, the union was interested in understanding more about the learning experiences and opportunities of employees within SMEs in the immediate region. Workplace learning, the union felt, was an issue of growing importance for trade unions organising in the community, as well as the workplace. The high priority given to training union ‘learning advocates’ illustrates this commitment towards employee learning. Greater awareness of conceptions and practices of learning by employees within SMEs, together with the constraints and opportunities, would aid the union in its move from dealing with large companies (such as British Steel) to working with a variety of smaller companies that have emerged within a restructured sector.

In this study of SMEs in South Yorkshire, England, interviews were conducted with 23 employees in a variety of manufacturing workplaces during a 12-month period between 1999 and 2000. A semi-structured interview format was used. These interviews were fully transcribed. In using this material to prepare this article, our approach was to emphasise the interpretative function of the researchers (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000) towards this collected data. Our interpretations were discussed between the three authors. We used a ‘data-driven’ approach, as opposed to a ‘data-centred’ approach, such as that used in grounded theory or in ethnographic studies, to reach these interpretations. The empirical material was seen as contributing towards the development of a particular way of understanding social reality. The collected interview material


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from the SME employees, in other words, enabled us to develop arguments, support particular interpretations and generate insights around, in this case, the substantive issue of learning. We were aware, however, of the constructed nature of the empirical data and therefore understood the research relationship as essentially one of ‘co-construction’.

The Subjects of Learning

Aspirations and Actualities

One of the most significant historical features of the education and training of working-class men in England is the pressure to leave school at the earliest possible moment and start earning a living. Low aspirations were matched by low achievement and jobs that demanded brute strength, rather than high skill levels. Clive [1], currently a maintenance foreman with an engineering firm, went into coal-mining – ‘down the pit’ – at the age of 15 in 1970:

I left to get some money rather than carry on doing O levels and what have you. I was down to do the maximum 8 O levels that you used to do in those days. Although I was in a comprehensive school, I was in the stream that were doing O levels at the time. It was the culture then. We have had this conversation and we have had it from time to time and people say that line from the Kirsty McCall song, ‘I could have been someone, well, so could anyone’. We were having the conversation the other day. Yes, I do regret it. Anyone can say what they could have done, but they can’t see that from our background, you left school. ... That was what you did. That happened to all the people I dealt with and played with if you want, and played football with. We just wanted to work, get some money and get married, and that was it. That is what we did.

The sense of regret is balanced by a determination in his ‘new’ job in engineering (he has worked there for 20 years) to be proactive about training, especially in relation to the introduction of new technology. When asked by the interviewer if he had pushed to get on a particular course, Clive replied:

Yes, and only because there would be only me that realised that that was the way we ought to go. There wasn’t anyone above me who could say, ‘Look, there is an interesting course coming along, you ought to go on it’. I would have to take it up myself and say, ‘Look, there are some courses I can go on’.

He saw management as disinterested in training, passive: ‘I just felt that it was lip service to training at that particular time’. Sending people on training courses was not in order to meet business needs, but for reasons of self-justification: ‘The fact that the people in charge of the training, it is for their self-gratification of saying at the end of the year “Look, we sent all those people on courses”’.


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Larry, a foreman in a steel firm, has a similar story to tell of a ‘hit-and-miss’ approach to starting work:

If you want a complete history, I jumped on my bike and went for a ride just to find a job. At that time in 1959, there were lots of people leaving school because we were classed as War Babies and that was a time when there were a lot of people leaving school. After the war, everybody seemed to start a family and so I couldn’t get the job that I wanted, which was in carpentry. I wanted to be a joiner, but I couldn’t get that. I got on my bike, round to [name of firm] and they said ‘We have got a vacancy for a hammer driver in the forge. Would you like to take that on?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re on about’. So they said, ‘We’ll take you down to the forge and let you have a look and see what you think’. So I went down and it was a dark, murky hole, a terrible place. You wouldn’t dream of sending your own kid in there for a job like that, but because of the time and I wanted a job, I took it on board.

Nine months later, he was offered an apprenticeship, and served 5 years with related college training. Oliver, an electrician with the same firm, had served an apprenticeship with British Coal, and is an enthusiastic attender at any courses he could find, often in his own time and at his own expense, but ideally, he might not have become an electrician:

I always ... it might sound stupid, but I fancy geography and geology. I did look into doing some sort of geology/oceanography with the Open University. I also looked at literature from Sheffield Hallam [University] but that was too time-consuming.

Most typically, larger firms use appraisal systems to determine training needs. Nigel is the Training and Development Officer for an engineering firm. It is, technically, an SME, although in fact a wholly owned subsidiary of a USA-based multinational:

What we do, we would identify what training we need. I would liaise with someone proficient in that particular area. We would write a Training Plan out together and someone from that area would deliver that training who was proficient at it. It might mean that we need to send them on a trainer training course for about a year ... Each year we have what is called an [xxx], in other words an appraisal, which throws up a hell of a lot of training and personal development which results from [skills] audits.

At the same time, Nigel is not prepared to say that the outcomes of such a well-organised training programme are quantifiable:

It is basically a continuous cycle of improvement on an endless belt. That is how we do it: you identify your training needs, we prioritise the training, we design and develop the plans, we implement the


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plans, we validate the programmes, we evaluate the training and that leads you back into identifying your training needs again. ... It is improving performance and productivity hopefully but you cannot really quantify any seen results to that. You can only endeavour to improve and develop. If a guy says to you, ‘Well, you show me where the training development that you have done has reduced such and such a cost’, you cannot often say that. You can pick one or two specifics out where training has improved quality and improved output but you cannot say, if you look at a set of figures, ‘Well, training and development has reduced it by “x” amount’. You could say that it has helped towards achieving this.

The firm discounted employees moving away after receiving further training. Despite the fact that this firm was seen both locally and nationally as a ‘flagship’ firm for training and development, its closure had been announced at the time of interview. The customer base was global, with Japan the leading customer, and the parent company in the USA no longer found South Yorkshire a viable production base.

If appraisal schemes are found useful by management, they are mistrusted by employees. Terry, a turner in a steel firm, said:

In fact every year we fill a questionnaire in about our hobbies and what you would like to do in the future. I think they just go in a cardboard box. I have filled in those for four years and I have stated that I would like to know more about CNC machines, but they have never got back to me.

Hamish, the MD of a Packaging firm, used appraisal as a modern way of meeting the learning needs that in the past had been acquired informally by ‘sitting by daddy’. However, he acknowledged that it was a difficult process:

We spend quite a lot of time getting the appraisals done each year. The supervisor or appropriate manager will sit down with an individual and then sometimes additionally with a team, talk about their aspirations, what they want to achieve, what they have achieved over the past year. ... I would not like to say that it’s all ‘hunky-dory’. We are learning quite a lot as we go along with it. A lot of it depends upon the confidence of the supervisor who does the appraisal; making the person feel relaxed and making them feel that it’s not an interrogation and that they can actually speak openly ... So there is a lot of training that we try to put in about how to do appraisals. We have an extremely good video about how to do appraisals.


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Summary

Employees have learning aspirations, but these are inhibited by aspects of both working-class and workplace culture, which emphasise embedded (and relatively unchanging) practical know-how. While appraisal may be seen as a way of systematising learning aspirations and needs, in its present top-down form it does not seem to work as an effective way of engaging employees in workplace learning.

How Employees Actually Learn

Mel, the miner turned engineering foreman, was determined not to be left behind by new technology and had enlisted the support of a much younger man, Alan, doing a ‘gap year’ between school and university:

I remember vividly the first day we got my PC set up and he sat with me and I said, ‘Look, I don’t know how to turn this on. Show me’. We started that way and it has not been a very efficient way of learning to be honest. I think with hindsight I should have perhaps gone on a basic computer course! But I can remember thinking the first week, ‘I’m not getting anywhere’. I felt that I would never criticise [Alan] ... He found it difficult and I can understand that he probably felt a little overawed by somebody of my age asking him to teach me things. So it was not the most efficient way of learning but then, like everything else, you look back and all of a sudden I am able to do it. The little more that I gleaned, the more I experimented, and the more experimental I became. [Alan] was then not needed as I went my own way and looked at databases and things like that which were going to be useful to me in the event of getting the software which I think they are going to get now after all this time.

New technology, then, familiar to almost all school-leavers, has reversed the traditional model of younger employees learning informally from older ones.

A personnel manager from a younger age-group, Diana, who had done little IT at school, felt that the ideal way to learn was a mixture of formal and informal:

Interviewer: Where did you pick that up from? Diana: Again, that was at work, talking to other people and asking them ‘How did you do that?’, when I have seen what they have been able to do. So I suppose basically that’s it, and then it’s a case of trial and error, isn’t it? Interviewer: So informal then? Diana: Very much so. Although next week we are starting some in-house training with an outside trainer to do some IT training with managers. I am down to do that.


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Those training and development officers, like Nigel, who have embraced the competence-based NVQ system, have done so because it corresponds to their own sense of how skills are passed on in industry. He gave a telling example of how an NVQ differed from a City and Guilds course:

Now on that course you only have to get a 50% pass mark. Part of that could be doing a programme. You could write a programme to produce a product, just for instance let’s say a stub axle. Now you could write that programme out, just get one part wrong, the thread wrong, at the end you could still get a 95% pass because they would knock you down 5% for that thread being wrong. That stub axle would be of no use to anybody.

The difficulty is, of course, that with IT it is much easier to learn by trial and error, with the errors generally being less disastrous than those that might happen during production. The steel firm MD pointed up the ongoing problem of recruiting skilled workers in jobs where the ability to produce work to high quality standards from Day One was at a premium:

It’s easier to recruit managers than it is to recruit people on the shop floor to be honest. A good manager who can manage this business could manage another business, you know. If you work in a paper mill and you are a good manager of people and you can improve and develop the business then you should do as well here as you would in the paper mill. Whereas if you are a paper mill operator you aren’t going to come and be a forge-hand without the full training because it is not a transferable skill. It can take anything up to a year to get anywhere near the levels of some of these guys.

Summary

As in most studies of informal (situated) learning at work, the link between informal learning and action in the workplace is clear in all of these examples. Later in the article, there will be further comment on how the contribution of informal learning to workforce development is maximised in a communicative workplace, that is to say one where communication between workers is encouraged, valued and deliberately fostered.

Government Intervention

Despite repeated calls from academics (Keep, 2000a, b) and trade union leaders for action to oblige employers to invest in training, this call has gone unheeded by government. The position of the United Kingdom government remains unchanged from the 1990s: the task of government is to encourage training as a form of investment by both employees and employers, but not to ‘threaten’ labour flexibility and business profitability by establishing an obligation on employers, let alone a right of employees, to training. At the same time, it is


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surprising how many examples there are of government regulations that do make training a requirement. John, the training and development officer for the USA-owned medical engineering firm, gave a very clear example of this:

We were also accredited to the FDA, that’s the American [i.e. USA] Food and Drugs Administration – to trade our products in America, you have to be accredited to that. So when they take straight audits and it clearly states in these audits that training has to be ‘well documented, controlled and recorded’. So therefore the training we have done in-house is well structured documented training programmes and certificated.

Similarly, International Organisation for Standardisation standards also required documented training, while health and safety regulations meant that ‘That always comes top in the priority order’. Yvonne, the health and safety officer in the steel firm in this case-study, pointed out the way in which such statutory training could also raise wider educational issues, in particular the continuing impact of low levels of literacy achieved in initial education on later working life. She told this story:

There was one gentleman who had worked for us for about 35 years and he was an absolute marvellous worker and we wanted him to go on this (Health and Safety certificate) course. But no, he thought they were a waste of time, they were rubbish. Anyway, talking to him in the office, what I discovered was that he couldn’t read. Well, he could read but not every well. He could write his name but that was about all. And what had happened was that any forms or anything that we sent to him were given to his wife to complete. Well obviously, because he didn’t want to go on courses, it was making the other men not want to go on the courses. So what I did was I spoke to the tutor and he said, ‘Well, what we can do is, he can sit in and he can listen, and instead of him doing the exam, what we can do is ask him the questions. We can write down the answers for him and then that’s the way we can do it’. So we gave him the book to use. I spoke to his wife and his wife was saying, ‘We’re going through it every night, over and over’. He passed the exam and he was absolutely thrilled about it and it was like giving him a thousand pounds, giving him that certificate. He was really proud of it. ... What we found out was that there was not only him in that position but there were two more people. So therefore we were able to identify a problem.

Another example of statutory training came from Hamish, the MD of the packaging firm:

For instance we come under the Packaging Waste Directives here, and there has been quite a lot of training to do for that. I have to say that we haven’t done it because we think it’s good for the company,


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we’ve done it because we’ve had to. Certainly a number of the safety aspects we would want to do, don’t get me wrong on that, they are right and proper, but equally, we need to do them in a particular way because that’s what is laid down in statute.

At the same time, such training requirements can be met by methods other than sending employees on formal courses, as Larry, foreman in the steel firm, explained:

Larry: The one about the fork lift truck training, it was informally organised. What happened with that was that I found out being the foreman and getting the work from the saw shop to the forge for them to forge rings, well sometimes we didn’t have a fork lift driver. For me to get on the fork lift truck is OK, I can drive. But if any accidents occurred then I would have been responsible, so I needed some sort of training and it was organised that I had training with this chap who had passed as a trainer. I have a certificate for it now, so I can get on the fork lift truck and drive it any time I want now. Interviewer: So that was externally done? With an external trainer? Larry: No, it was done with an internal trainer. It was done with [name] who is in charge of the fork lift trucks. He had been to a course on how to instruct people. He passed that on to me. He taught six or seven people.

Summary

Legislation (national, in countries that are trading partners and by multinational organisations such as the European Union) can create the need for new learning at work and often requires formal, certificated approaches.

Why Do Employees Learn?

A Learning Culture: individuals and communities in the workplace

In the first section of this article we:

• outlined just a few of the many disfunctionalities of the training culture in the United Kingdom, disfunctionalities which in general are commonplace in the literature (Keep, 2000a, b);

• outlined the links between learning and action in the workplace; • indicated some of the ways in which government regulation of industry

forces firms to train.

The interviews conducted in this study also reveal the enormous amount of learning taking place in firms, and the investment in it by both employees and management (although seldom pulling in the same direction). This is to be expected at a time of rapid technological change and in this section of the


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article, reference will be made to a variety of reasons that explain the learning taking place in the workplace.

Faced by a culture in which working-class people have placed little value on formal education and training, a low valuation shared by a large number of industrial managers, there has been a conscious effort in some firms to instil a ‘learning culture’ in the organisation. Traditional managerial attitudes, such as ‘leave your brains at the factory gate’, are certainly in retreat, so in a case study such as this, what is of interest are examples of tendencies that may be contradictory in nature, and no attempt is made to quantify attitudes of either workers or managers. David, a manager in the engineering firm, exemplified this new culture of learning in his own life (he said of one course: ‘I did it of my own volition. It was something I did for my own interest’, even though it was clearly work-related) and in his attitude to his work: ‘Everybody in the company is doing some form of training’. Personal factors have a significant value in explaining personal attitudes and outcomes:

My dad was also very keen on education and when he retired he did his O levels and A levels and then he went on to do some diplomas in Archaeological Site Management. He signed on for Manchester University to do the Archaeology as a degree course. He had to give it up for health reasons, but he was always interested. I have always been associated with people who are just that bit smarter than me, and therefore I have always been interested in everything somehow.

In relation to IT, he has learned a lot from his wife, who is ‘very literate and she is capable of doing things on the computer I couldn’t, so I learn a lot from her as well’.

Motivation can also be much more direct and materialistic, as Larry the steel foreman suggests:

Lots of them in the forge would love to learn and train on the andromat because that gives them more money. So they are prepared to learn and train on that and get a job there because there is more money paid. But formal training, like education around a table, you will not get anybody volunteering.

Oliver, the electrician who has already been described in this article as an ‘enthusiastic’ learner, found that his wide range of qualifications was not always helpful in looking for a permanent job instead of his present temporary contract:

Oliver: So far I’ve had sixteen interviews. Interviewer: Sixteen? Oliver: Sixteen. That’s in twelve months. ... I’ve had four offers and I’ve turned them down because it has not been quite what I wanted. You just have to keep plodding at it. Interviewer: So that is why you are finding the qualifications fitting in?


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Oliver: I am finding now, the position I’m in, I am in the middle. I am too qualified for an electrician, and I’m not quite qualified enough to take on a higher management project engineer’s role. It’s awkward. Interviewer: But you must be building up experience at the same time? Oliver: Oh, aye.

However, he still insists that his desire to learn more is not just about job insecurity:

Even if I am satisfied in my job, I am still going to want to know more. ... I want to continue and do more and more. Doing that you keep your brain ticking and it’s giving you a challenge.

Summary

There are indications of cultural change within workplaces as employees struggle with the contradictions generated by workplace change.

Qualifications Inflation

As the workforce becomes better qualified, so higher threshold qualifications are demanded for specific jobs. At one level, experienced workers feel they have ‘learned through experience’, informal learning on the job, but at another level they feel pressure to gain qualifications almost as an insurance policy in an uncertain labour market. Christopher is a structural engineer and expressed this double bind very clearly:

I think [learning] is helpful if it results in formal qualifications simply because in the future you can actually prove to somebody who may want to know that you can do a particular job. I mean, you can say anything you like to people, but if you can demonstrate it in terms of a certificate or an award that you have proved that you can do a job, or a particular activity, then I definitely think there is a benefit in that. Informal training, you are talking about experience, and if you have experience, how do you demonstrate that you have got experience? I think that is where there is a problem with informal training.

This creates a difficult position for personnel professionals, since they are also caught in a double bind: an emphasis on supporting (informal) learning as against an emphasis on qualifications valued by employees, used by external customers to measure ‘quality’ and emphatically supported by government policy and rhetoric. Diana is a personnel officer:


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Interviewer: Do you think that learning is more or less valuable if it results in formal qualifications such as certificates and diplomas and so on? Diana: I don’t think it is, but I think that often people want to see something at the end of it. They perceive perhaps themselves that if they have got a certificate it is more valuable. But I am sure that it isn’t. I do think that people expect something, you know.

At this point, the issue of qualifications overlaps with other problems in the workplace and broader issues of management-worker relations, which make ‘rational’ approaches to workplace learning quite difficult. Max, MD of an engineering firm, stated:

One of our older machine operators decided that he wanted to have NVQ3. For him to work for us he doesn’t need it, but I’ve got a feeling that it was because his step-son got it in his apprenticeship, and there has been a frank discussion at some stage and he decided that he wanted it. I suppose that he felt that if he wanted he could take it elsewhere if he left here and wanted some sort of recognition, but in actual fact if ever I was to write a reference for him I wouldn’t need NVQ3 to give him a reference. He was probably thinking ‘What if we fell out?’ and I wouldn’t give him one. The truth of the matter is I would. If the reference is about his abilities as a machine operator and even if we fell out on bad terms, I still would.

Summary

In a credentialist society, there is a grave danger of confusing ‘learning’ with the possession of certificates, of underestimating the importance of uncertificated learning and, indeed, of other forms of informal learning that generate action in the workplace.

The Impact of Major Lifelong Learning Events

It is the general thrust of this article that informal workplace learning is an undervalued asset, but also the case study throws up important examples of where a major investment in formal lifelong learning can greatly increase the chances of individual employees coping with the kind of major industrial restructuring that has been occurring in South Yorkshire. It also suggests that Senker (2002, p. 138) may be overstating his case in asserting that ‘the failure of SMEs to demand highly qualified workers is of equal significance to their competitiveness’. This may mark an accelerated path within an existing career (examples 1 and 2) or a complete change of direction (examples 3 and 4):

1. Martin is a team leader who served an apprenticeship that led eventually to an HNC: ‘I got made redundant. I then did a degree full-time, although


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had I stayed at work, I would have done it part-time. It just speeded that up really’.

2. Nigel, a training and development officer with the USA-owned engineering firm, had trained as a mechanical engineer with British Steel but was made redundant: ‘Well, what I did in 1987, I left British Steel and I went on a nine-month Computer-Aided Engineering course’. This was funded by the European Union via the Manpower Services Commission.

3. Diana, the personnel manager is a ‘woman returner’ to study: ‘I wanted to go back to work basically. I wanted to go back into nursing but ... we decided that nursing wasn’t a career for someone with a young family which I had at the time’. She studied O and A levels, and then a part-time degree in English at the local polytechnic. She then started working for her husband’s firm, and was drafted into a new post as Personnel Manager, which has involved further substantial part-time study for an IPD qualification.

4. Yvonne has moved from a clerical job to being responsible for health and safety: ‘I think mentoring is as important as anything if you have someone who will help you and someone you can turn to. I was very late in doing a supervisory course, and I had not been in education for thirty years, so therefore I could hardly write anything down, well, you know what I mean, put reports together. ... I used to have to do homework and I used to do it. If I got stuck I would go and talk to [the MD and the Accountant] and they helped me through it.

Summary

Where lifelong learning opportunities are made available by the state, this may enable individual members of declining communities to reshape their career path. However, this seems much more likely where there has been successful experience of initial education and training (examples 1-3).

Individual Commitment to Learning

One of the lessons of this case study is that much learning at work, both formal and informal, happens almost despite any systematic approach to learning at work, and depends very much on the interest and application of individual workers. Significantly, all three examples in this section come from the steel industry, a sector characterised by a high level of job insecurity. David, the team leader was certain that ‘you have to keep up with changes’. The only thing that could be known for certain about any job was that ‘it will change. I think that is inevitable’. The managing director, William, placed this in the context of criticism of job security, which he saw as producing a stable workforce, but one that was increasingly unwilling to engage with learning and change. In the same vein, he regretted that it was often the younger workers who made the move into full-time education or retraining via evening classes at college:


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Yes, job security can be a disincentive to learn because people feel secure in their job and if they haven’t an aspiration to move on in life, then they will be satisfied where they are. Whereas if they are concerned about their jobs, they will look and think about how they can make their job more secure and they may go out and choose training. Things that have happened here, not long ago, when we offered opportunities for training to go onto two machines as against staying on a single machine – at a time when redundancies were pending, people applied. As soon as the redundancies were out of the way a couple of them withdrew from it because they felt their jobs were secure again, so they felt they didn’t need to train.

Yvonne, the health and safety officer, was even more explicit about what had happened in the firm:

I think it’s an incentive to learn. Especially when going through the redundancies because what we did was a skills matrix. So obviously the more skills they had, the more we were likely to retain those people. Unfortunately we let those people go who had not got those skills.

Such an approach justifies learning skills not related to the current job from the employee’s point of view, because ‘people can go on courses that are not related to their work but if another job came up and they had those skills, then they could take those skills elsewhere’. She argued this too about her own job:

There is a lot of job satisfaction in here in the job that I do, but there is always the fear that you won’t be required owing to redundancies. So the more you learn, you can take those skills somewhere else like, for instance, I am hoping to develop those counselling skills, and so maybe if I’m not needed, I can then move on and take them to another job.

Summary

If from a management point of view, the ‘rational’ approach to learning at work equates business needs with training needs, as we shall see in the next section, from an employee’s point of view (including managers), faced by the double-bind of unpredictable changes in workplace technologies and skill demands, the ‘rational’ approach is to attempt to second guess the labour market in an apparently ‘irrational’ way!

Human Resource Management (HRM)

HRM is one part of so-called scientific management, designed to maximise the added value derived from labour costs. Its best-known form in public policy is Investors in People (IIP), which seeks to relate training as closely as possible to


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business needs. Like other aspects of employment, it has soft and hard dimensions, represented in this case study by the views of two MDs – Hamish (packaging) and Max (engineering).

For Hamish, having a good reputation for training is a virtue in itself. Above all, training should be recognised as ‘an issue that persuades companies of its own virtue’. He accepts that not all the workers they train will stay:

It’s the usual thing where you can train two people a year and one of them goes, so we are doing other people’s training for them. We take the attitude that we would rather do that than not have the skills available.

For the same reason, he is also a rare supporter in industry of the training levy, which ‘equalises training costs and forces those companies that do no training at all to pay something towards those companies that do’. At the same time, he recognises that this sometimes meant that firms trained for its own sake: ‘So what you tended to get was volume of training, not quality of training. What is really important is that the training should be relevant for the company’. He welcomes the commitment of the Graphical, Paper and Media Union to training: ‘They are absolute allies with those of us who are training people’. Hamish supports government intervention in training policy and thinks ‘there has to be some national strategy’.

Max outlined the engineering firm’s policy of training based on appraisals. At the same time, he made it clear that training was a ‘management prerogative’:

We do annual appraisals and we do ask people what kind of training they think they need – training requests. We then assess them and either grant or turn them down basically.

Yet he admitted that the firm did not have a training plan as part of its business plan. He clarified this by explaining that training was a cost line on the Business Plan and he read out to the interviewer the relevant passage:

Due to an extremely tight market we are going to have once again [to] reduce our training costs. We must bear in mind that training if done right will pay for itself. ... Due to ever increasing fiscal pressures, staff training is being kept to a bare minimum.

The thought that ‘training if done right will pay for itself’ did not seem to imply any way of quantifying this on a balance sheet. Yet when he explained the training that was happening, Max accepted the description of Human Resource Department (HRD):

Max: The sort of courses we did (looking through papers) – empowerment, understanding total quality, all the sort of cause and effect analysis. Interviewer: Modern human resource development? Max: Yes, that sort of stuff. In fact this is Customer Care which we needed to do. We had some training that was tailored to our own


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needs to get people focused on what our business requirements were. So we did quite a lot of training in that respect. Exactly how effective it has been I am not really sure.

So the two examples have this in common: in neither case is evaluation done in such a way that training can be quantified as a business ‘good’: for Hamish it is an act of good faith; for Max a cost line on the balance sheet.

Three examples from the steel firm suggest how very different HRD can feel experienced from different positions within the firm.

Terry. Terry the turner felt that management left them to get on with it when problems arose:

Interviewer: If you did have something that you struggled with, who would you go to ask about it? Terry: There isn’t anybody. We do it between ourselves. There is self-development in the machine shop. This firm takes advantage of you.

Courses about team-working were regarded as ‘a waste of time, really’. He saw workers held back from expressing useful ideas and opinions: ‘People are held back because they can’t stand up in front of people and say what they really feel. That’s what holds people back’. Somewhere he had clearly heard about something called ‘communication skills’:

Terry: That’s what I said, the biggest drawback to people is their ability to talk to people. People get nervous or can’t find the words. If you have got communication skills, then you can do things. Interviewer: Would you like to see a course on communication skills by the company? Terry: Yes, I would. Interviewer: You could bring it up at the next team briefing. Terry: Straight away, intimidation is there before you start. You want to see this Managing Director and he is sat in here. They will all be in before me. They will all be sat above me, and then he has been on courses, he has got to have, to learn how to be. There is a set routine on how to do things and he will stick to that routine and I will be totally lost. So, no matter what you say, I can’t say it because I don’t know the proper way to do it.

David. David is a team leader and gives a more sympathetic description of the teamwork approach. It is also clear that he has developed an ability to work in this kind of way that is only partly dependent on formal training:

Interviewer: Do you deliberately try and coax things out of people? David: It’s generally a fact that the people who are doing the job have got the best ideas. So yes. It’s a lot better to listen to their ideas


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about why a job won’t work than it is to come up with an idea yourself. Interviewer: Do you think you picked up the listening skills from the Team Leadership training or do you think you have picked it up from experience with working here? David: I think it’s something you have always done, but when you are on these courses and hear these ideas, you probably do it slightly better. ... In a way, the team training, probably for the first time the directors were actually coming down and asking to hear the ideas. It made it almost acceptable and probably spread the message and the idea what the firm was about. ... Interviewer: Did they use the word ‘empowerment’? David: It was said a lot, yes. It was said a lot and it was certainly different from the culture we had before. When things went wrong, people did get blamed and they got formal warnings etc straight away, so it did change things a lot.

William. Yet team briefings stopped for a while. William, the MD, explained why:

There was a significant change when I joined the organisation in the way I work and again there was another change when [Smith’s] took over. [Smith’s] are an authoritarian, ‘from-the-top’ type of organisation, ruled by edict really. [Jones’s] was very much, particularly with the previous MD ... who was a consensus person, team-working type, and that was why I was recruited as a team-worker by the previous MD to push those types of policy.

Yet despite the change of ownership, William has remained in post (though forced to suspend team meetings for a while) and is determined that local management will continue their previous policy. One particular feature of the firm is the push for IIP:

William: There are two things I would state. One, the present incoming directors were told to get IIP. There was that side of it so they went for it. But there was an underlying feeling that, yes, we needed to change things. We needed to recognise the employees as a valuable resource. We needed to develop the business to become successful and that was the approach. Interviewer: Do you see IIP as an essential part of that or an important part? ... William: Yes, it can be used as one of the tools to drive the business forward in order to get employee development geared towards the development of the business.


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William also referred to the difficulty often unacknowledged in this field that individual managers may have more or less enthusiasm and skills for the issues involved with appraisals and relating training to business needs:

We do yearly appraisals and skills matrices for each department and the idea is that we look at the matrix, we look at the needs of the business, where is the divergence, what do we need in terms of training our people. That’s the concept. But I would not pretend that this business is fully there. It really has depended on the local managers. Some managers have been good at recognising what the business has been trying to do, seeing the appraisals and the whole idea of training. Others have done it because they have been told to do it.

Summary and Discussion

William’s experience ranges from being a fitter on the shop floor through trade union convenor to an MBA. But he would still seem to have some way to go to make the transition from the HRD paradigm to the communicative workplace paradigm that, as is suggested in the next section, may well hold the key to developing informal workplace learning. Larry, forge foreman, suggests a rather more old-fashioned approach to supervisory management may still have its advantages:

You can approach someone on one hammer and if you were to say to them, ‘I want that’, well he will come out with the Saxon language. He would tell me what to do. So you have to say, ‘This job has come and it’s pretty urgent’ ..., and believe me, you will get more satisfaction and he is liable to do the job then. But if I said, ‘This job is urgent, they want it and it has to be done today’, then they would tell me what to do. That’s one chap, another chap you might make a joke, because you can have a laugh with him. There are different ways of getting jobs done by learning about personalities.

The observations by Terry (above) also suggest that the assertion by Yvonne of a ‘culture change’ in this firm may be a little premature. It is clear that in HRM theory, management defines ‘empowerment’ as the attempt to engage worker subjectivities and tacit knowledge for employers, which is quite different to the sense of this word in community development work. As William demonstrates (above) there are different approaches and degrees of success in achieving the engagement of worker subjectivity.


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How and What Do Employees Learn?

Formal and Informal Learning in the Workplace

As already suggested in this case study, there appears to be a remarkable undervaluation of the amount of informal learning in the workplace. Larry, the forge foreman, specifically excluded from his work repertoire the role of ‘trainer’:

Interviewer: Do you instruct anyone? Do you do any training yourself formally? Larry: Not formally, but with the experience I have gained under the hammers, if on walking round the forge I can see anyone struggling, especially people who are new to the hammer, then I can give them hints. You can say, ‘Well, it’s better to do it this way rather than that’. You can help people in that way and I do, but I don’t like to have a day when I am a ‘trainer’ ... Interviewer: So it’s just on the job, then? Larry: It’s on the job and anyone who has a problem, they can come and ask and I will help them.

There is a hierarchy of experience in the forge through which knowledge (here equated with action) is passed on:

You start to work up and you are gaining experience all the time. You start as a fire lad, hammer driver, and you go onto a second hammer where you are working under the hammer with the first-hand, learning all the time. So when you take over first-handing, you have got a good background of the knowledge.

At the same time, Larry does not eschew other forms of knowledge coming from a scientific knowledge-base:

Larry: If something goes wrong they can come to me. If I can give them any information, I will. If not, then I have to go to Technical and see them or Research & Development or the technical directors. I will say, ‘Look, we’ve got a problem here. The steel is breaking’. They will come on the job and have a look and people will say, ‘Well, turn the temperature down, try this and that’. Interviewer: So if you didn’t know what to do, you would know who to consult? Larry: Yes. Every problem is there to be solved.

So informal learning should be seen not as an alternative to either qualifications acquired before starting a job, or training courses, but in dynamic relationship with both. Fred, a manager in one of the engineering firms, first learned Computer Aided Design and Draughting (AutoCAD) by attending a college course ‘for my own interest’. However, in this case, work practices have caught


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up with theory, and he now finds himself in great demand at work to help other employees:

Interviewer: When you say informal, how is that actually structured? Is it part of your normal working day or are there sessions for it, or … Fred: No. Nothing is structured. It is something I do. You could argue, ‘out of the goodness of my heart’. I get asked to show a guy how to use AutoCAD and it develops from that. I spend a few hours doing it and it is done on a very informal basis one-to-one. It is never done in a classroom operation. It would be impossible to do. Interviewer: So you regard that as part of your remit? Fred: Yes. I am not actually paid to go out and do that, I do that as part of my way of looking after distributors and my salesmen who work for me.

Martin, a team leader at another engineering firm had been on the receiving end of this particular form of workplace transaction, to supplement formal training:

We have done computer training as formal in-house training. I would say that as far as the job is concerned, it is mostly informally in-house. A lot of the design has been informally done and I have learned it by people actually showing me how to do it. Drawing has been developed between us. It has been training in a sense of the word.

What is more difficult to assess is the impact of formal courses with more amorphous titles such as Communication Skills or Team-Building. Christopher, a structural engineer, described one 4-day course (presumably a major investment for the firm) like this:

I think its was just to get people ... well, I don’t know what the intention was, but just getting people mixing, not in a working environment, with other people and developing a few skills that maybe had gone a bit ‘blunt’. ... I think some of it was not particularly relevant but quite interesting to do. I suppose it came as a package really. People just went on the whole thing.

This notion of training as a ‘package’, rather than being directed at specific learning needs seems a major criticism of industrial training. It is quite different, for example, to the notion of a general course giving a grounding in a particular subject area that can be built on by individual study and experience:

I needed to go on a course because I needed ... not having any experience of what was involved in Personnel, I had to get some ground rules and something to work around. That is why I did that. It was excellent, it was very good for that. Obviously that is just a basic course but I felt that was enough for what I needed. (Diana, Personnel Manager)


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Summary

As Guile & Griffiths (2001) have argued in their study of the development of generic skills in work experience, it is possible to distinguish between ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ aspects of skill formation. Here, vertical refers to the sort of abstract skills acquired on college-based training courses, while horizontal refers to the way in which knowledge and skills are learned and used in context in a workplace. The context includes the job-in-hand, but also workmates. As we shall see in the next section, this shared, collective aspect of workplace learning deserves to be better understood and integrated into policy discourse. At the very least, some further attention needs to be paid to cognate areas such as employee involvement, co-determination and industrial relations in order to move beyond the narrow formulations of HRM.

The Communicative Workplace

It is our general contention that informal learning is best supported and encouraged by workplaces that encourage maximum interaction and minimum barriers between employees. Both these points are illustrated in the examples that follow. Positive examples. Clive, maintenance foreman, engineering firm:

I am probably standing on the fence, but your people have got to be formally trained but I see the informal training as developing people. It is like growing up and being a better person for just learning by talking to people. I think it brings people closer together. If you are learning in your job informally, it would seem to suggest that there is some sort of social side of things that aren’t too bad because you are communicating with people. It is important. ... You can go away and learn about how to wire up a given control panel but the things that you learn at work are all based on the people around you, and the environment you are working in.

Doug, MD and owner of an engineering firm, gave a striking example of both problems and response as an SME grows bigger and less ‘personal’:

I have always been good with people. I have always been interested in people. I think that has come over to the workforce. The trouble is that as you get bigger, my problem then is that I lose that relationship.

The firm is now going for IIP status:

Why? Because I want us to communicate with people. I want to have a structure in place whereby we have an evaluation system so that we are able to bridge this gap of being a bigger company and so bring in everyone involved.


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Yvonne, the health and safety officer, described how she had gone on an IT course, ‘but to be honest I did not understand them because there were youngsters there who had been brought up with computers and I couldn’t understand’. She had found it easier to learn by trial and error and getting colleagues to help her:

And another thing is being able to communicate with other people to get the knowledge that you want. If you went to somebody and said, ‘Come on, I want to know how to do this’ – you have got to have a way of asking them to come and help you do it because they don’t always want to come and help you.

Negative examples. Fred, a manager in an engineering firm, described what he saw as ‘a huge lack of commitment out there in industry generally’. This was both from company to employees and vice-versa. Prompted by the interviewer’s description of many firms as employing a core of permanent staff and a periphery of temporary staff, he stated:

There are a lot of companies who I work with, customers, who, the core and periphery as you call it, they are a great bunch of guys in the core, and they are a great bunch of guys in the periphery but they both hate each other.

This suggests that ‘us and them’ attitudes may have been redefined, but have not disappeared.

Nigel, a training and development manager, described a change of site manager and a change of culture that was clearly positive to informal learning:

Nigel: He was a bully. It is confidential, this, isn’t it? He also held personal grudges against people. If he didn’t like you … Interviewer: So his interpersonal skills weren’t too good? Nigel: Exactly. If he didn’t like them, he would want them out. Where the culture changed when [Sam] moved. We have now got a Site Manager who is completely different. He communicates, it is fed back, he listens to people and encourages them to develop themselves and that is a big plus.

Summary and Discussion

Hamish, the packaging firm MD, was probably the person in this case study who had the most developed views on the communicative workplace. Employees needed to ‘fit’ in a company, ‘because you can actually put skills into somebody, but what you can’t do is change somebody who is not willing to be changed’. Team working was more than putting a bunch of employees together and leaving them to get on with it:

There are skills in putting the right sort of team together, making sure it’s a balanced team with the right sort of personalities, not all


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dominant and not all cowering in a corner. You know those sort of obvious things, but also the right sort of skills and the right sort of chairmanship skills as well [in order] to be able to draw conclusions.[2]

He had a vision of what a company might look like in which employees were encouraged to take initiative and a positive interest in their jobs, in a sense bridging the wide gap between ‘work’ and the rest of life that has grown up as a result of industrialisation:

I think we all find it difficult to do things just because we have to, we much prefer to do them because we really enjoy it. If somebody enjoys their job, they are going to want to do it better. That’s why it becomes a virtuous circle. That’s why you get these fantastic buzzy companies that, particularly the new IT companies, where everybody’s sleeves (are) rolled up and they are learning all the time. It must be a very exciting environment but that’s completely part of the culture, isn’t it?

Learning Schemes?

In recent years, various schemes have been thought up to increase the amount and quality of training and learning in the workplace. Not surprisingly in an area like South Yorkshire, which has been a target for many government initiatives (cf. Senker, 2002), this is reflected in the case study firms. Christopher, a structural engineer in an engineering firm, began work with the firm as a Teaching Company Associate with a local university, a scheme devised to enhance knowledge transmission between universities and business. As part of this he began an MPhil and, having been taken on as a full-time employee, he is now writing this up in his own time. He has been developing a design code that will enable the company to sell into the European Union. Doug, an engineering MD, was puzzled by the nature of government support. With regard to the phasing out of the TECs and the Business Links, he described this as ‘absolutely unbelievable because if it’s not working, do you scrap it?’ He felt that these organisations could have been reformed without the upheaval involved in setting up new support mechanisms (the LSCs) from scratch.

One engineering firm had experimented with a TEC-supported employee development scheme, where employees can get up to £100 to pay for learning of their choice, such as driving lessons or foreign languages. Take-up has been about 20% with a bias towards office staff. Diana, the personnel manager, saw it as ‘a bit of a perk for people rather than anything else’. Bill the MD, was philosophical about the firm’s personnel policies, denying bottom line benefit, but nevertheless determined to persist:

One of the problems is that the more you give, the more is expected. We have problems in dealing with people that competitors wouldn’t have, because I was talking to someone about a week ago, actually,


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who has just joined us. He was saying that the culture of the place he has just left, the manager would come out and cuss and swear at them all and they responded, you know. Whereas if we go out there and forget to say ‘Good Morning’, it would be down tools, you know. ... Having said that, I mean, people’s own quality of life is important to us. At the end of the day if we want to treat them as human beings, then let’s do that and not sort of be put off by the negatives that you get from that.

This rather negative valuation of non-work-related learning might be contrasted with the view of Fred, an engineering manager, who saw such wider learning as of specific benefit in problem-solving at work:

I think the non-vocational learning has got to be very important; just to give your brain cells a different direction in thinking. I am sure that is what makes people use the expression ‘smarter’ – to be able to think in a different direction.

William, the MD of the steel firm, saw community involvement as having similar advantages:

There is an opportunity coming up in the local community with [xxx] Council who want us to become involved with tree-planting at schools, so that they have outside environments where they can work in the summer, and that’s if we can commit people to getting involved in that. I have said ‘Yes, we will’, because I feel people will learn that there are social issues out there that they need to be aware of, that businesses are aware of, developing and putting something back into the community, but they will learn from that working with other people and relating it to project management.

Yet behind these various new schemes to improve learning at work lies an older model, that of apprenticeship, which in case study interviews was used on a number of occasions as a bench-mark for workplace learning. It is little wonder that having ‘allowed’ industry to kill off traditional apprenticeships, the government has now reintroduced them as ‘Modern Apprenticeships’. It is the characteristic combination of ‘learning through doing’ and ‘going to college’ that is suggestive of an inclusive approach to workplace learning that emphasises both informal and formal learning, and the relationship between them. There is something almost archetypal about the pride with which Larry, the forge foreman, can state: ‘I did five years as an apprentice blacksmith. These are my papers to prove that I did it’. (A university graduate might hang their diploma on the office wall, but would hardly take it along to an interview with a researcher!) He asserted that:

The best way to learn anything is by doing a few mistakes, as you learn from your mistakes. But not only that, there were four other blacksmiths there and anything that I needed to know, I just had to


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ask and they would show me. Also, in the early days I watched them, totally amazed by their skills. ... If I was going to be a machinist or a tool maker, I think they had got set out methods of training people. Normally with a village blacksmith, it’s handed down from father to son. They just pick it up by generally getting experience on the job and that is more or less how it was for me.

However, there was also attendance at college, which was:

part of the apprenticeship. You have got to have some technical ideas as well as the practical. The practical was actually doing the job and learning the job. But you had to have some method, some idea. They wanted you to be fully conversant with all the steel industry.

Terry the turner had also served an apprenticeship:

It was excellent. We were properly trained in an apprenticeship. The first year was just general: fetching errands, staying on the shop floor. You were left to your own devices most of the time, but you were picking things up, even though you didn’t know it. Talking to people, and people who were old craftsmen.

At the same time, he had also valued college:

They used to say it was all a waste of time, the old chaps. There was only one way to learn and that was by doing it. Things were moving on and as fast as I was learning that, things were moving on so you had to go to the Tech to keep up with it.

Summary

The continuing strength of the apprenticeship ‘ideal’ in workplace discourse about education, training and learning, suggests that at the very least developments, such as the ‘Modern Apprenticeship’ need to be located more firmly within wider discussions about the ongoing relationship between initial education and training, informal workplace learning and lifelong learning.

Conclusion

There have been significant changes in employees learning in recent years. More and more employees are actively learning both formally and informally, in part dictated by the immediate needs of changing jobs, in part by a desire to stay ahead of technological and economic change. In addition to formal courses of instruction, this involves substantial informal learning, which is best understood as expansive learning. As Engeström (2001, pp. 137-138) argues:

People and organisations are all the time learning something that is not stable, not even defined or understood ahead of time. In


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important transformations of our personal lives and organizational practices, we must learn new forms of activity which are not yet there. They are literally learned as they are being created. There is no competent teacher. Standard learning theories have little to offer if one wants to understand these processes.

In practical terms, just as apprenticeship + college had superseded apprenticeship, so a new model might involve apprenticeship + college + lifelong learning, with the latter including elements of formal courses and an element of informal learning supported by mentors in a communicative workplace. This may be represented in diagrammatic form (see Table I).

Working life stage Formal education and training

Workplace (informal, expansive) learning

Initial (apprenticeship) Knowledge and skills Learning ‘on-the-job’ Initial (further and higher education)

Knowledge and skills Work experience

Lifelong Training courses (work or college) or major lifelong learning episode

Informal (situated) learning, perhaps formalised as ‘mentoring’ by individuals and groups

Table I. Expansive learning in the communicative workplace. In so far as a reappraisal of learning in SMEs may seem appropriate at this moment in time, it needs to integrate a number of policy areas, such as further education, workforce development and lifelong learning. Above all, there is a need for it to be informed by contemporary learning theory, to which Yrjo Engeström has made a major contribution with his observations on expansive learning.

Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge the financial contribution by the European Social Fund for this study, and the work of the Research Officer, Dr Richard Stevens, in this project.

Correspondence

Keith Forrester, School of Continuing Education, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom ([email protected]).


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Notes

[1] The normal conventions of pseudonymity have been observed in this case-study. Some information has been given about the sector and size of firms, which are all located in South Yorkshire, but we have deliberately not given information that might enable the reader to identify them.

[2] We suspect football managers may have known this for many years.

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Learning in small- and medium-sized enterprises: time for a reappraisal?

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