significant outcome, highlighted by employees, the tutor and the manager, was an increased confidence on the part of employees to embark on further learning.
What worked well? · Formal English courses increased the confidence of the employees, which led the company to expand their course provision. The courses also encouraged some employees to experience higher level roles that entailed more hand-on learning.
What could have worked better? · The supervisors could have been more actively involved · Mentoring and coaching support needed to be more systematic, to better utilise the missed opportunities for learning in everyday work activities.
These examples have also shown that care should be taken not to confuse strategies for getting by at work with informal learning. Supervisors taking pre-emptive or circumventing action over tasks involving literacy skills can create a vicious circle of employees' over-reliance on others, for example their reliance on supervisors to fill in forms. This misses the opportunities for practice and coaching support and reinforces underlying skills deficiencies instead of helping to solve them.
At an engineering company, in a third example, the employees' motivation for engaging in the trade union- initiated course was underpinned by a high value placed on learning for its own sake, and its relevance for other aspects of their lives. Grass-roots initiatives on the part of Union Learning Representatives (ULRs), with the wider support of the company and local college, led to the development of workplace English and maths courses. Though the company has undergone major organisational change in embracing new technology and implementing more rigorous surveillance procedures which entail increased forms of documentation, it was noticeable that the vast majority of learners had coped adequately with their existing literacy and numeracy skills. The employees performed numeracy skills such as calculating averages and working with diameters without having formally acquired these skills on a course. Informal learning processes had equipped all the learners, except one employee who struggled with the metric system, with the necessary skills to undertake their work. The course was regarded as a means of benchmarking the formal level, or classroom level of their skills which had been developed through informal learning in the workplace.
In a fourth and final example, the levelling out of management structures within a defence establishment has increased the significance of both formal and informal learning opportunities. The successful IT and English courses at this organization were tailored to the priorities of delegation of responsibility in the organization. In this case, English and Maths courses responded to major structural changes in the company involving the delegation of responsibility to lower-level employees and were being utilised to address a perceived training imbalance amongst the different strata of the workforce. As part of taking on more responsibility, employees were encouraged to commit themselves to training opportunities through the appraisal system, and employee involvement in formalised training had the potential to generate benefits in terms of promotion and pay. The levelling out of management structures also had major implications for informal learning. The expectation that employees should 'take on more' and 'show initiative' meant that employees were frequently given greater scope for learning about new duties through on-the-job experience at work.
The experience of providers and organisations in developing workplace English and Maths is extending our existing frameworks for understanding informal learning and the scope for adults to seek out learning activities at and through work. While self-directed learning is held by many adult educators to define adult learning, it has also been described as hard to achieve within the workplace context as the constraints are
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