Adult Learner at Work

The challenges of lifelong education in the new millenium

Robert Burns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367717384
• eBook ISBN: 9781000299526
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Adult Education
• Index: Business

Knowledge is one of today's few meaningful resources. Equip yourself to ride the rollercoaster of racing change, globalism and technological super-innovation that is life and work in our age.

Completely revised and updated for the 2000s, The Adult Learner at Work, 2nd edition is for educators, trainers and managers who want to stay in touch with the latest thinking in their fields. Dr Robert Burns explains the important changes that have swept through the field of post-compulsory education and the worldwide swing to the lifelong learning as the gateway to a learning society. When work, education and life satisfaction can truly intermesh, sustainable prosperity becomes achievable. Robert Burns explores such questions as:

* What conditions have created lifelong learning, learning societies and learning organisations?

* How have government and business responded?

* What methods and processes enhance the learning potential of adults?

* How can we motivate adults to learn?

* What are the effects of advancing age on our ability to learn?

* Is competency training an effective tool for encouraging learning?

This new edition examines how and why we must facilitate the learning potential of all members of society. The Adult Learner at Work, 2nd edition provides an attractive vision of the development of learning environments in the workplace and the community setting-integrating skill learning and personal development using well founded principles of adult learning.

part one
the context — national and international

Part 1 of this book examines the national and international context in vvhich new approaches to workplace learning are being promoted. Teachers, trainers, human resource practitioners and managers all need to understand the changes that are taking place and vvhy education, training and personal development for members of the workforce and the community at all levels must be integrated in a comprehensive strategy that directs the activities of the nation and individual enterprises tovvards lifelong education. A future learning society should be concerned not only vvith broadening its knovvledge and innovation base but vvith improving access and equity, facilitating the resolution of problems a complex future vvill bring in the economic, social, environmental and political arenas.

chapter 1
the changing context of work

If you give a man a fish, he will have a single meal.

If you teach him to fish, he will eat all his life.

Kuan Tzu

It is important to remember that there is no one predetermined future but a range of potential futures depending on which purposeful decisions and actions we take. There is a past that is gone forever but there is a future that is still ours to determine.

R. Burns 1991

As we enter the twenty-first century, the context in which individuals, organisations and the national productive endeavour are jointly engaged is changing at an exponential and disruptive rate. Ellyard (2000) argues that we are midway through a transition from a Cowboy Culture to a Spaceship Earth Culture or Planetism. The journey involves moving from an individualistic, unsustainable consumption-directed and confrontational world to one of interdependence, sustainable living and equity, supported by innovative technologies. The changes might be global, but they are creating greater divides between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. The gap between ‘amazon.com’ and the Amazon is growing. Even in industrialised countries, there is a disturbing growth in inequality.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in its Survey of Household Expenditure (2000a) on behalf of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) reveals a sizeable body of ‘working poor’: two million people battling to survive. In the USA, the ratio of CEO pay to that of the average company worker rose from 42: 1 in 1980 to 419: 1 in 1998 (Evans, 2000). Recent census data from Singapore (Straights Times, 10 Feb. 2001), a very wealthy country using the intellectual capital of as many citizens as possible, reveals that the gap between rich and poor has widened, with the monthly income of the latter actually declining by nearly $100 a month from 1999. The upper 20 per cent income bracket earned 21 times more than the bottom 20 per cent, up from 17.9 times in 1999. The International Labour Office’s (ILO) report World Employment 200 I emphasises a widening global digital divide, with an increasing number of workers unable to gain access to emerging technological resources to ensure productivity in an increasingly digitalised world. For example, the report notes that 90 per cent of all Internet users are in industrialised countries, whereas Africa and the Middle East contribute only one per cent. The speed of diffusion between wealthy and poor countries is increasing. Unless this is addressed as a matter of urgency, human and national aspirations, whether in occupational, social, educational or moral terms, cannot be realised.

Ensuring access to technologies and ensuring that employees possess the constantly emerging specific and personal portable skills to use them are fundamental policy areas that all countries need to consider. There is a bewildering mix of uncertainty, risk, insecurity, division and massive opportunity in all of this. Even in OECD countries, the challenge is to try to remove the digital divide, along with the growing insecurity it brings, and enhance the wellbeing that emanates from new ways of working and living out one’s life. The most successful countries will be those that can balance market pressures of adaptation and dynamism with social concerns of equity, access, security and involvement. This means broadening access to post-school education and introducing a general entitlement to lifelong learning similar to the entitlement established in the past to retirement pensions. This chapter will consider in brief the context of change and the specialised and general skills needed by individuals and enterprises that promote lifelong learning during the adult years to satisfy the economic and social imperative to create learning societies, cultures and organisations — themes taken up again in Chapters 2 and 3. In the areas of education, training and work, the changes governments, organisations and individuals must respond to can be grouped in categories, including globalisation, technological, economic and structural change and job/career redefinition.

GLOBALISATION

Globalisation is changing the way enterprises are managed and work is performed. The focus on productivity, quality, efficiency and competitiveness, derived from innovation, skills and quality improvement, has made the quality of the workforce — and consequently training — critical components of competitiveness. Australia is facing increased pressure to be responsive and competitive in a global market. New enlarged markets like the EU, ASEAN and APEC provide considerable competition, while the removal of protective tariffs opens up local industry to imports from lower-cost emerging economies. In Australia this has been devastating for the textile, footwear and clothing industries.

It is clear that many futurists, such as Toffler (1980) and Ellyard (2000), see us moving into the twenty-first century as a post-industrial society. What we are experiencing is a world-wide transformation in production and processing methods, a move from heavy industry to professional services and a move from local economies to massive regional and world economies controlled by multinationals and non-elected bodies like the WTO (Greider, 1997). (Of the top 100 economies 51 are corporations.) Whether or not this should be the case and how we as a society should cope with these issues and transformations is for debate elsewhere. However, what is apparent already is that the impact of the technological future combined with a global economy underpinned by an ill-balanced so-called free trade system has already changed the employment outlook for the generation at present in schools and colleges and for future generations, particularly in less developed countries beset by depredation of their natural non-renewable resources, unfair free trade, other environmental issues and deskilling. Many big brand corporations employ no factory workers at all, outsourcing their goods to create a corporate weightlessness, making nothing, but selling a brand that they morph into a lifestyle of logoed shirts, reverse caps and polychromatic rubber footwear.

An awareness is dawning that the global economy is a subsystem of the global ecosystem; growth is not gain but in reality decline, with the destruction of assets. Production and consumption can no longer be conceived as separate from the total environment — the source of the inputs and the waste heap for the outputs. The balance sheet of local, national and global economics must include the losses — those costs derived from air and water pollution, ozone depletion, wetland and forest destruction, clean-up costs, the consumption of non-renewable resources, etc. This makes future prosperity and developmental possibilities look less healthy. It should redirect thoughts about jobs in an unsustainable-development ‘Cowboy Culture’ context towards portable life skills that enable people to live at a reasonable level in self-renewing communities that permit both development and environmentally virtuous behaviour through human-scale activities.

The global economy is not so much global in operation but global in its ability to move freely to wherever it perceives a more profitable production base or market to be (Barnet & Cavanah, 1994). These socioeconomic and ultimately political issues raise questions about the style, content and aims of education and training provision in all parts of the world, but most pressingly in developing countries where many young people are destined to be mere window shoppers while the rest of us buy through e-commerce. The contrast between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ will become more stark rather than diminishing in the contemporary global systems. Barnet and Cavanah (1994) and Greider (1997) all critically review the negative impact so-called globalisation is having on work availability and the ability of individuals, groups and nations to benefit from global economics and migratory multinationals.

Market reform in the region has created a new future for Australia. External trade barrier removal is opening up Australia to competition. Nonetheless, Australia’s ability to compete in world markets is eroding. The prosperous Dreamtime of the lucky country has turned into a nightmare of harsh reality. The productivity growth of competitors outdistances our own. The capability of our economy to provide a high standard of living for all Australians is increasingly in doubt. As jobs requiring little skill are automated or go offshore, the demands for a highly skilled talented pool of employees grows and the backwater of unemployable rises. The dilemma that Australia faces is that without technology the country will not be competitive in world markets and unemployment will soar even higher. New technology does, however, help to maintain competitiveness and prevent countless others from joining the ranks of the jobless. Protection for manufactured goods has until recently prevented Australian manufacturers from being efficient and in so doing kept them incapable of selling abroad to offset the decline in the export of primary products. Removal of tariffs in a phased program from 1988 now forces Australian manufacturers to face international competition. In addition, in 1983 the exchange rate was floated and controls on foreign capital flows by Australian companies removed. All this has induced the Australian economy, historically inward looking apart from primary products, to become increasingly open and internationalised. The Government required organisations to stand on their own feet, become more self-reliant and efficient and perform at world best practice standards.

At the same time over the past decade, the pace of Asian development has moved up a few gears, stuttering somewhat in the late 1990s but picking up again, not only through the application of technological progress but with billions of potential customers in Asia, the old USSR, India and Latin America who have all joined the global market economy. The increased international mobility of capital is driving productive capacity to new low-cost industrial countries particularly in Asia. The opening up of trade with developing Asian nations has major implications for unemployment and real wage levels for unskilled employees in Australia’s workforce. Large numbers of unskilled workers in Asia are concentrating on labour-intensive manufactured goods. The prices of these goods are therefore falling and this has implications for all old, industrial countries of an increasing emphasis on services instead of manufacturing.

Despite this downside, improvements in transport and communications and the reduction in protection will ensure that international trade will continue to grow. It will provide Australia with greater market opportunities for the agricultural, mining and manufacturing industries. The growing economies in South-East Asia will provide substantial market opportunities. Citizens of these economies will also travel more and will require services in Australia, such as accommodation, recreation, restaurant and retail. These areas will experience very strong employment growth.

While the provision of services has always been important, this sector took off in the 1980s and is a typical phenomenon throughout the world as GDP per capita increases. Developments in developing countries place formerly strong manufacturing countries under strain with regard to wages relative to production costs. This means the Western World must move over to selling expertise, being problem solvers and continually refining and developing products in order to stay ahead of the pack. There is a premium on intelligent manufacturing and provision of services, particularly value added services. Organisations in these circumstances must be flexible, innovative and possess quality management. The old approach that called for an unintelligent workforce mass-producing specialist items is past. The real hope to sustain income in the future is not just numeracy, literacy and technological skills, it is also ‘operacy’ — the ability to make things happen. A key strategy Australia could use to take advantage of globalism is improving and developing its workforce skills.

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

Many terms have been used to denote the current technological revolution, many linked with the word ‘age’ such as ‘computer age’, ‘robot age’, ‘microelectronic age’ and ‘knowledge age’. Other terms describe new versions of society such as ‘information society’ and ‘post-industrial society’. We have other labels like ‘the third wave’, ‘the global village’ and ‘Planetism’. But whatever the name we prefer, it signifies a major discontinuity with the past. No matter what label future generations give this period it will be remembered as an era of social, economic and industrial transformation that impacted on every aspect of life.

Change is an inevitable part of life and has been a feature of every era, impacting on social, economic and political life. The Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions — previous major changes in the way life was organised — both had massive effects on how and where people lived and how they earned their livelihood. The technology of steam gave way to the technology of electricity, which, in its turn, is gradually being replaced by newer technologies. Each innovation brought with it consequent changes to production methods, skill requirements, organisational structures and the social and economic infrastructure needed to support the change. The latest change, the Technological Revolution, with its microelectronics, communication super-highways, nano-technology and biotechnology is no different in its impact on the way work and life itself will need to be reorganised. The shift will bring new values, new pressures, new products, new services, new relationships, new ways of living out one’s life, new sources of identity and esteem, new career structures, new demands for coping with change and new opportunities.

This kind of change is rapid, widespread and penetrating, influencing the structure and thinking of whole societies. People need to learn very different skills from those of previous ages — how to use different equipment, how to use different materials to make products that were unknown a decade before. Mankind is no longer the labour force, it is now the developer and controller of energising machines that are far more powerful, involved in increasingly complex situations in a game that is increasingly abstract. Words and symbols replace action and d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• table of contents
• preface
• about the author
• part 1 the national and international context
• part 2: the adult learner: psychological background
• part 3: educating the adult
• concluding overvievv
• bibliography
• index