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What a difference workplace learning makes: Selected papers from the Centre for Research in Lifelong Learning Conference, Stirling, Scotland, 24-26 June 2005. John Field
Introduction
Increasingly more labour organisations in The Netherlands are confronted with the disappointing effects of traditional strategic training and development policy. Training and development arrangements often appear to render a poor return on investment and often lack transferability. Both lack of outcomes and transferability strongly relate to changing work place demands. Traditional training models do no longer fit the requirements of the current work environment. More than ever, work places require the development of broad competences and contextual knowledge instead of specialised skills aimed at fixed problem solving strategies. These bottlenecks have prompted some labour organisations to switch over to more employee-led human resource development. This approach is based on the principles that the employee is entrepreneur of his or her own talent, that work is not a routine process but rather a learning process, that motivation and curiosity are more important than corporate strategy and that learning is based on mutual attractiveness between employee and labour organisation ([7] Keursten, 1999; [20] Van der Waals, 2001; [19] Van der Waals et al. , 2002).
Apart from organisational level reasons for engaging the employee in HRD-systems, policy makers of both government and social partners are confronted with macro trends in society that promote demand led mechanisms for post-initial training. These macro-trends involve on the one hand the development of a competitive knowledge economy and on the other hand an ageing labour population. In due time, a smaller labour population will have to keep up with the requirements of the knowledge economy. Therefore, policy makers face the challenge of encouraging older working adults to stay employable longer and to be longer active in working life. Furthermore, they aim to raise the mean educational level of the entire labour population. This implies that the adult labour force should be motivated to participate in lifelong learning.
Therefore, since the end of the last century, a development of innovative arrangements for employability in Dutch Collective Labour Agreements can be observed ([8] Labour Inspection, 2004). These innovative arrangements involve all kinds of HRD-instruments in which the equal responsibility of employer and employee are explicitly reflected. Company development...