Learning to Work & Working to Learn
The way we work is definitely changing, due partly to:
- Increased connectivity to more people;
- Increasing complexity in the work we get paid to do;
- Distributed work that is more global in nature or influence; and
- The need to learn as we work.
Look at these changes over the past century:
Individual Work — from Vocations to Jobs to Roles
Learning to Work — from Apprenticeship to Training to Collaboration
Organization of Work — from Local to Regional to Networked businesses
Consider this. Friends of mine have four children in their late twenties and early thirties. All are in the ‘workforce’. All four went to university and some have completed graduate degrees. At this time, not one has a ‘job’.
The world has changed and we had better get used to it and learn to adapt.
What are your roles? How do you collaborate? Where are your networks?
Never thought of collaboration as being a natural successor to apprenticeship.
Makes sense, though.
Equally, I’d never really formally categorised apprenticeship as being a learning activity (in the UK there’s a residual association with ‘job creation’ and cheap labour).
And if *I* haven’t made that connection then heaven knows what the people I work with think of it all.
Thinking allowed now. Thanks for putting a cat among my pigeons.
I see apprenticeship as the older, pre-industrial model, while training dominated for the past century. We now have to learn more collaboratively, as more of our work is in networks which are always-on and make performance much more transparent. Apprenticeship and training will continue to co-exist with collaborative learning, but training will no longer dominate, IMO.