Tag: workplace learning

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Epistemological agency and the new employee

Author: Raymond Smith, Griffith University

Edition: Volume 45, Number 1, April 2005

Summary: The necessary learning actions new employees must undertake to meet the performance requirements of their new job may be said to constitute a constructivist epistemology of necessity. This view forms a useful basis of inquiry into new employee workplace learning as it seeks to explicate the significance of what new employees ‘do’ in and through their learning. This paper briefly outlines the rationale and findings of one such inquiry. It proposes that what new employees ‘do’ may be best conceptualised as exercising their epistemological agency. An interpretive analysis of this ‘doing’, through a framework that identified the mediating factors of new employee learning, characterises the new employee-learner as a manager of their personal workplace learning agenda. It gives new emphasis to the role of the individual in the social construction of knowledge. Such an understanding of the new employee-learner suggests possibilities for enhancing a sociocultural constructivist view of learning that seeks to account for the personal purpose and consequence of learning.

Keywords: constructivist epistemology, epistemological, employee-learner, workplace learning

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Challenges in aligning workplace learning with business goals: A perspective from HRD professionals in New Zealand

Author/s: Tom Short and Roger Harris

Edition: Volume 50, Number 2, July 2010

Summary: Modern organisations have become more complex, less mechanistic and increasingly sensitive to rapid changes in the external environment than in previous eras. Today, executives lead employees through a maze of complexity and changing contexts. However, another group of dedicated professionals, the human resource managers and practitioners, also play a big part in shaping business success. For human resource managers, learning how to cope with a diverse range of people-centred challenges has generated a succession of workplace development initiatives aimed at aligning education and training with business strategy (Anderson 2009). In the knowledge economy, the value of workplace education and training has become a mantra for business survival. Simultaneously, in response to a requirement for change, the human resource management (HRM) profession has engaged in frequent and often inward-looking processes to re-define its own contribution, not only to the effectiveness of an enterprise but also to the individual employee and wider community. Within this evolution, in some organisations, the traditional sub-areas of HRM, such as human resource development (HRD), have gradually become detached from mainstream HRM and assumed a role quite different in both purpose and approach to from the more hegemonic notion of resources management. This paper draws insights from a group of senior HRD professionals in New Zealand to review the significance of workplace learning in a strategic context and identify the challenges the profession faces in meeting the demands of complex workplaces. The paper focuses on how HRD professionals go about aligning learning activities with business objectives—often with mixed results.

Keywords: human resource management, workplace learning, business objectives

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This article is part of AJAL, Volume 50_2. The entire volume is available in .pdf for purchase here.