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How to Create a Personal Learning Syllabus: 5 Steps

Notebook with "goals" written inside

  • 17 May 2018

A learning plan—also called a learning syllabus—is often associated with college students and undergraduate education, but it can also provide immense value to professionals looking to develop the skills needed to advance their careers.

Having a learning plan can help you conceptualize, work toward, and achieve a goal, whether it’s a new skill, expertise in a subject matter, or the ability to complete an unfamiliar task.

For example, think of a skill you’d like to develop that would have an impact on your effectiveness at work or your long term career.

Now, think of all the ways you can learn that skill. Perhaps you can gain the skill by reading books or taking classes in person or online. Consider the variety of programs, certificates, degrees, websites, and videos have been created that could teach you the skill or supplement your education. How do you sift through the available options and choose the best for your lifestyle, resources, and goals? That’s where a personal learning plan comes into play.

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What Is a Personal Learning Plan?

A personal learning plan —also called a personal learning syllabus—is a self-directed planning tool to help an individual achieve specific learning objectives.

It communicates what you need to do to gain the skills you want to develop, when each action needs to occur, and how to measure success.

One fundamental principle of instructional planning is backward design , which requires you to begin with an objective and work backward to plan the steps to achieve it. With that principle in mind, consider setting aside some time to craft a personal learning syllabus of your own.

Follow these five steps to develop your own personal learning plan and work to achieve your professional goals.

5 Steps to Creating a Personal Learning Plan

1. identify a learning objective.

Before creating a personal learning plan, you need to identify your objective.

Your learning objective could take a number of forms, such as completing a challenging project or task, developing a new proficiency or skill, getting a new job, or becoming eligible for a promotion.

Your goal should be attainable, yet challenging enough to engage you. It should also be important enough that you’ll prioritize it over the other demands on your time. You also need to determine how to measure your success. For example, how would you define proficiency in a new skill? Be sure to have a clear finish line in mind for your goals.

2. Break Your Objective into Smaller Goals

To more easily reach your overall learning objective, break it down into smaller goals. Think of these smaller goals as the steps you need to take to achieve your final objective. Lay them out sequentially as the modules of your syllabus.

For example, if your goal is to become proficient in data science, your smaller goals may be to learn the individual data science skills that lead to proficiency. These smaller goals might be focused on learning skills like data literacy , data wrangling , and data ethics .

By breaking your objective into smaller goals, it’ll be clear what you need to learn and how to get there.

3. Develop Your Plan

After identifying your overall objective and smaller goals, it’s time to use this information to develop a comprehensive plan.

Rather than simply writing a lengthy document, it may be more helpful to utilize a visual chart or spreadsheet for your personal learning plan. That way, you can easily visualize the steps in your learning journey.

Organize your plan in chronological order, listing each of your learning goals, the action you need to take to reach them, and the date by which you would like to complete each action. It’s important to craft your plan in a way that communicates whether you’ve been successful in meeting each smaller goal and how close you are to meeting your larger objective.

4. Take Advantage of Available Resources

After developing your personal learning plan, it’s time to take action. Take advantage of the many learning resources that are available to you to gain the skills you’ve outlined in your learning plan.

Consider researching learning activities such as:

  • Online certificate programs such as HBS Online
  • Books (physical, digital, or audio)
  • Websites (for instance, reference sites, professional organizations, and video sharing sites)
  • Educational blogs and articles
  • Degree programs (online or in-person)
  • Professional conferences or networking events

After adding these resources to your plan to complete your learning path, you’re ready to dive in. By following the personal learning plan you’ve created, you can master a skill, get a promotion, or expand your knowledge.

Related : 5 Time Management Tips for Online Learners

5. Hold Yourself Accountable

After you’ve successfully created a personal learning plan, your work has only just begun. It’s crucial that you hold yourself accountable and follow through on the learning activities you’ve outlined.

It can be difficult balancing a career, personal responsibilities, and education. Learning new skills can be time consuming, but you have to put in the necessary time to meet your professional goals. Try to set aside time each week dedicated solely to your learning.

Stay aware of the deadlines you assigned to each goal so you can put in the work and monitor your progress to gauge whether you’re on track to meet your overall objective.

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Taking Your Career to the Next Level

Lifelong learning is key for career growth. By developing a personal learning plan and making a commitment to gain new knowledge and skills, you can create new professional opportunities for yourself and take your career to the next level.

Do you want to advance your career? Explore our online course catalog to discover how you can develop vital business skills. Download our business essentials flowchart to find the right course to begin your learning journey.

This post was updated on August 20, 2021. It was originally published on May 17, 2018.

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About the Author

Seven essential elements of a lifelong-learning mind-set

Organizations around the world are experiencing rapid, sweeping changes in what they do, how they do it, and even why they do it. Increasing globalization and new technologies demand new modes of working and talent with new and diverse skills. To flourish in this environment, individuals must keep learning new skills. In fact, studies show that workers who maintain their ability to learn outpace other professionals. 1 Barbara Mistick and Karie Willyerd, Stretch: How to Future-Proof Yourself for Tomorrow‘s Workplace, first edition, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. The people who will thrive in the 21st century will be those who embrace lifelong learning and continually increase their knowledge, skills, and competencies. 2 Hae-du Hwang and Daesung Seo, “Policy implication of lifelong learning program of EU for Korea,” Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2012, Volume 46, pp. 4822–9, doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2012.06.342.

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Building a workforce of such lifelong learners is critical for organizations to respond to a changing business environment. To ensure they have the required skills and talent, companies must create a learning-for-all culture in which people are encouraged and inspired to continue learning new skills.

But the burden does not fall exclusively on businesses; it’s also up to the individual to seize the opportunity to get ahead. Seven distinctive practices can help employees become lifelong learners and remain relevant in today’s business environment (Exhibit 1).

1. Focus on growth

Learning starts and ends with the individual. But is there a limit to how much a person can learn? Is intelligence fixed at birth or can it be developed? In 2008, researchers asked the ten best chess players in the world—people who had spent 10,000 to 50,000 hours mastering the game—to take an IQ test. 3 Nicholas Mackintosh, IQ and Human Intelligence, first edition, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998. They discovered that three out of ten had a below-average IQ. Since playing chess at the top level in the world is associated with extreme intelligence, they wondered how this result was possible.

Many studies have confirmed that it is not intelligence that creates expertise but effort and practice—that is, hard work. 4 Geoffrey Colvin, “What it takes to be great,” Fortune, October 19, 2006, fortune.com. The most successful people devote the most hours to deliberate practice, tackling tasks beyond their current level of competence and comfort, observing the results, and making adjustments. 5 Edward T. Cokely, K. Anders Ericsson, and Michael J. Prietula, “The making of an expert,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2007, hbr.org. Such studies show that intelligence can be developed and that there are no limitations on what we can learn throughout our lives. Indeed, the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with use, and learning prompts neurons in the brain to make new connections. 6 Jesper Mogensen, “Cognitive recovery and rehabilitation after brain injury: Mechanisms, challenges and support,” Brain Injury: Functional Aspects, Rehabilitation and Prevention, Copenhagen, Denmark: IntechOpen, March 2, 2012, pp. 121–50, doi.org/10.5772/28242.

Over the past 30 years, Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University, has intensively studied learners. 7 Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, first edition, New York, NY: Random House, 2006. She has determined that people generally fall into one of two categories when it comes to how they view their ability to learn: a fixed mind-set or a growth mind-set. And she has concluded that mind-set has a significant impact on the effort put forward, perception of criticism, willingness to accept failure, and, ultimately, how much will be learned.

People with a fixed mind-set believe that their learning potential is predetermined by their genes, their socioeconomic background, or the opportunities available to them. They might have thoughts like, “I’m not good at public speaking, so I should avoid it.”

Those with a growth mind-set, however, believe that their true potential is unknown because it is impossible to foresee what might happen as a result of passion, effort, and practice. They appreciate challenges because they see them as opportunities for personal growth. Ultimately, they may achieve more of their potential than someone with a fixed mind-set.

Organizations can encourage employees to tackle new challenges and learn new skills by assigning them new and different tasks. But individuals need to believe that they have unlimited capacity to learn and grow. People can take the following actions to develop a growth mind-set 8 Jim Thompson, Mindset: Powerful Insights from Carol Dweck, Stanford University Athletic Department, Positive Coaching Alliance, 2010, positivecoach.org. :

  • Determine if you have a fixed mind-set and, if you do, establish why.
  • Recognize that you have a choice in how you approach and interpret new tasks, ideas, or situations.
  • Learn to hear and observe the fixed mind-set voice without judgment while continuing to embrace challenges.
  • Refocus with a growth mind-set.

2. Become a serial master

Traditionally, workers developed deep expertise in one discipline early in their career and supplemented this knowledge over the years with on-the-job development of integrative competencies. This kind of knowledge can be represented by a T-shape or profile  (Exhibit 2).

Longevity has made this approach obsolete. Since 1840, life expectancy has increased three months for every year, meaning that people are staying, and will continue to stay, in the workforce longer. 9 Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott, The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, first edition, London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2016. Because of this trend, they need depth in different areas of expertise, supplemented with targeted on-the-job development, to stay relevant. Today, knowledge should resemble an M-shape or profile (Exhibit 3).

Imagine someone has her master’s degree in journalism and begins her career working at a publication. During her 30s, she finds herself specializing in financial journalism, so she decides to pursue a master’s degree in business economics. As she proceeds into their 40s and 50s, she might continue to grow by taking in-depth master classes on related topics, such as digitization.

Relevant skills have become currency in the workplace. Using the M-profile as a guide and achieving mastery in a few topics will set professionals apart. Organizations, for their part, can support workers in their development by offering stipends for coursework and suggesting master classes and professional development sessions.

Many researchers have suggested that learning takes place only when people stretch outside their comfort zone. 10 Andy Molinsky, “If you’re not outside your comfort zone, you won’t learn anything,” Harvard Business Review, July 29, 2016, hbr.org. When people work on tasks that aren’t entirely comfortable, they are said to be in their learning zone, where they acquire new knowledge and develop and practice new skills. 11 Andy Molinsky, “If you’re not outside your comfort zone, you won’t learn anything,”  Harvard Business Review,  July 29, 2016, hbr.org.

The learning zone exposes people to risk and stress, which can either be helpful or detrimental to their efforts. According to the Yerkes–Dodson Law, a curvilinear relationship exists between an increase of stress (which they term “arousal”) and the enhancement of performance (Exhibit 4). 12 John D. Dodson and Robert M. Yerkes, “The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation,” Journal of Comparative Neurology, November 1908, Volume 18, Number 5, pp. 459–82, doi.org/10.1002/cne.920180503. When people first encounter a new task, they experience “good” stress, leading to a higher level of performance. However, too much stress can cause anxiety (“bad” stress) and have a negative impact on performance. So, while it’s important for people to stretch outside their comfort zone, it’s critical to choose the right tasks and the right pace.

The personal growth and stretching that individuals experience from continued exposure to the learning zone typically follows a standard progression represented as an S-curve. 13 Whitney Johnson, “Throw your life a curve,” Harvard Business Review, September 3, 2012, hbr.org. Developed in the 1960s, the S-curve shows how, why, and at what rate ideas and products spread throughout societies. 14 Whitney Johnson, “Throw your life a curve,”  Harvard Business Review,  September 3, 2012, hbr.org.

When people try something new, such as starting a new job, they are at the beginning of a new S-curve. They experience a steep learning curve in which their knowledge and skills increase rapidly. During this first stage of the S-curve, their progress and the business impact of their performance are limited. After a time, they reach an inflection point where their understanding, competence, and confidence suddenly accelerate very quickly, and they have an increasing impact on the business.

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Continuing in the role for a bit longer, they will reach the upper, flat part of the S-curve. At this stage, the excitement of the new role has worn off, personal learning and development have stalled, tasks and activities have become automatic, boredom has kicked in, and their impact on the business has slowed down significantly.

If people stay in their comfort zone—not seeking out new challenges or new roles—their performance may suffer, and they might even be replaced. Lifelong learners, however, can avoid this pitfall and find new ways to stretch by starting a new S-curve. And organizations can help keep employees on track by providing learning and stretching opportunities at timed intervals.

4. Build a personal brand

Everyone has a professional brand, whether it’s a carefully crafted expression of who they want to be or simply the impression they make on others. A brand communicates a person’s value and provides a focus for personal learning and development. A brand that defines a person’s best elements and differentiates him is essential in achieving career goals—and in demonstrating his accomplishments, both to potential employers and current colleagues. When colleagues understand who a person is and what unique capabilities they bring to the table, that person is more likely to receive interesting new assignments or be considered first for new positions.

Key elements of a personal brand include authenticity, a clear value proposition, a story, expertise, consistency, visibility, and connections. In Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value, Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood suggest individuals can build a brand by setting clear goals for the year ahead, acknowledging what they want to be known for, being clear about their identity, and writing and testing a personal brand statement.

Once individuals craft their brand statement, they can use social media tools to help convey that brand and their skill set. For example, it’s possible to earn digital badges for a LinkedIn profile through online learning vendors such as Coursera, edX, Lynda.com, and Udemy. Such badges demonstrate not only a person’s skills but also their commitment to continued growth.

A personal brand is not static—it should evolve over the course of a career. Since most people develop new skills and play different professional roles, they will need to rebrand themselves multiple times. Lifelong learners use the process of building a brand to think through what skills they have and which ones they should develop to make themselves more marketable—both within the company and beyond. L&D professionals can counsel people in this process and provide a way for them to develop the necessary skills.

5. Own your development

Lifelong employment no longer exists, so people today expect to work for many organizations throughout their careers—and maybe even for themselves at times. To maintain forward motion in an environment that lacks continuity, people need to own their development and take charge of their learning through the following actions (Exhibit 5).

Create and execute learning goals. To become and stay successful, people need to ask themselves, “How can I ensure that I’m more valuable at the end of a year than I was at the beginning?” Individuals can create learning goals by assessing their current knowledge and expertise and identifying competency gaps. They should also plan to pursue the most important learning goals relentlessly, a trait that can become a competitive advantage.

Measure progress. People should periodically reflect and assess their progress. Learning journals or logs in which people can track what they learn have proved to be extremely valuable.

Work with mentors and seek feedback. Lifelong learners can forge a relationship with a mentor by letting different stakeholders know that they are open to feedback and by setting up formal check-ins to review their work and collect feedback. Feedback from supervisors, peers, direct reports, customers, and clients is a critical component of professional development.

Make personal investments. The level of learning required for individuals who want to retain a market-relevant skill set exceeds the amount of formal and informal learning hours that most organizations offer their employees. Therefore, people need to make more personal time and financial investments in their growth and development.

The following questions can help guide people as they endeavor to own their development 15 Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock the potential in yourself and your organization, first edition, Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2009. :

  • What is one thing you are working on that will require that you grow to accomplish it?
  • How are you working on it?
  • Who else knows and cares about it?
  • Why does this matter to you?

6. Do what you love

Most people are in the workforce for 40 to 50 years, and they spend a lot of their waking hours at work. As such, work has a huge impact on a person’s health and well-being, so it’s imperative that people do what they love.

Elevating Learning & Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field

Elevating Learning & Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field

A sense of purpose is essential for a well-lived life. In Japan, the term ikigai means “reason for being,” and it encompasses all elements of life—including career, hobbies, relationships, and spirituality. The discovery of one’s ikigai brings satisfaction and imbues life with meaning. 16 Gordon Mathews, What Makes Life Worth Living?: How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds, first edition, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1996. A study of more than 43,000 Japanese adults showed that the risk of mortality was significantly higher among subjects who did not find a sense of ikigai than among those who did. 17 Toshimasa Sone et al., “Sense of life worth living (ikigai) and mortality in Japan: Ohsaki study,” Psychosomatic Medicine, August 2008, Volume 70, Number 6, pp. 709–15, doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0b013e31817e7e64.

To find ikigai, start by answering four questions (Exhibit 6) 18 Alyjuma, “Ikigai: The reason you get up in the morning,” blog entry by Aly Juma, alyjuma.com. :

  • What do you love?
  • What does the world need?
  • What can you be paid for?
  • What are you good at?

Ikigai lives at the intersection of these questions. Of course, everyone’s journey of discovery will be different. What’s more, the meaning of work depends on how we view our work—our motivation as well as the objective of the work. There are there common different ways to look at the meaning of work (Exhibit 7).

Although organizations have a great responsibility to provide a context for meaning, individuals can do much to create a calling for themselves.

Exploring career purpose, meaning, and passion is not easy. It takes intentional reflection and planning. Individuals can also seek guidance from a career counselor or explore life design. Life design is a concept emerging from career choice and development theories as a method to help people explore and develop their identity and deliberately design a life that will give them meaning. 19 Mark L. Savickas et al., “Life designing: A paradigm for career construction in the 21st century,” Journal of Vocational Behavior, 2009, Volume 75, Number 3, pp. 239–50, doi. org.

Today, academic institutions are also helping set people up to craft a life they can love. For example, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans created a popular “Designing Your Life” program at Stanford University. Intended for juniors and seniors looking for career guidance, the course teaches learners to apply design principles to life and career planning. Participants learn about five mind-sets: be curious, try stuff, reframe the problem, know it’s a process, and ask for help. They learn about a range of different tools, from design thinking and a daily gratitude journal to decks of cards featuring problem-solving techniques and life-design interviews. Instead of taking a final exam, learners present three radically different five-year “odyssey” plans to their peers. Alumni of the program report that they repeatedly refer back to the tools and their odyssey plans as they evaluate and redesign their lives. Burnett and Evans have made their philosophy and tools available to everyone in their book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. 20 Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, first edition, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

7. Stay vital

The ability to stay vital can contribute significantly to a person’s development. This goal demands that individuals make health and well-being a priority—paying attention to exercise, nutrition, sleep, and relaxation (for example, mindfulness and yoga) and developing good, sustainable habits. The impact of such personal care and self-nurturing can be far-reaching: sufficient sleep has a huge impact on our ability to acquire, retain, and retrieve knowledge. Sleep also affects attention and concentration, creativity, development of insight, pattern recognition, decision-making, emotional reactivity, socioemotional processing, development of trusted relationships, and more. 21 Nick van Dam and Els van der Helm, “ The organizational cost of insufficient sleep ,” McKinsey Quarterly, February 2016.

Longevity in the workforce requires reinvention and growth. A reservoir of energy to support this hard work will help set individuals on the path to lifelong learning and provide the resilience needed to sustain these efforts.

While current circumstances demand that workers today be lifelong learners, many education systems and organizations are not set up to support this kind of learning. Individuals, then, must take responsibility for their continued development and growth. These seven elements can serve as a guide to those who wish to stay relevant and grow into new and different roles throughout their career.

For a free survey on lifelong learning, go to www.reachingyourpotential.org .

A version of this chapter was published in Nick van Dam, Learn or Lose , Breukelen, Netherlands: Nyenrode Publishing, November 2016. It is also included in Elevating Learning & Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field , August 2018.

Jacqueline Brassey is director of Enduring Priorities Learning in McKinsey’s Amsterdam office, where Nick van Dam is an alumnus and senior adviser to the firm as well as professor and chief of the IE University (Madrid) Center for Learning Innovation;  Katie Coates is a senior learning manager in the Philadelphia office.

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How to Create Effective Learning Journeys that Drive Employee Performance

May 11, 2021 | By Asha Pandey

How to Create Learning Journeys that Deliver Engaging Remote Trainings and Improve Employee Performance

True learning and the subsequent changes in professional behavior require a learning journey that enhances professional development and leads to improved performance. In this article, I explore the connection between learning journeys and their impact on employee performance.

What Is a Learning Journey?

A learning journey is a comprehensive, continuous process of acquiring knowledge and skills, designed to facilitate long-term behavior change and professional development. Unlike traditional training, which is often a one-time event, a learning journey encompasses a series of interconnected learning experiences. These experiences combine formal training, like structured classes and webinars, with informal learning opportunities initiated either by Learning and Development (L&D) teams or individuals themselves. This approach ensures that learning is not just an isolated event but an ongoing process that integrates new knowledge and behaviors into daily work practices, leading to enhanced employee performance. Formal training serves as a foundational element within this learning ecosystem, while the incorporation of informal training elements personalizes and enriches the learning journey.

Key Characteristics of a Learning Journey:

  • Structured and Ongoing: A learning journey is not a one-time event; instead, it’s a continuous process that unfolds over time, allowing individuals to evolve and adapt to new knowledge and skills. Integral to this process is the role of mentor feedback, which provides learners with essential insights and guidance, helping to refine skills and align learning objectives with real-world applications. This mentorship aspect enriches the learning journey, making it more personalized and effective.
  • Customized Learning Experiences: It comprises personalized content and a variety of delivery methods tailored to meet the unique needs and goals of individuals or teams.
  • Formal and Informal Components: It combines formal training programs with informal learning opportunities , creating a holistic approach that caters to different learning preferences.
  • Behavioral Focus: The primary goal is to induce positive behavioral changes, leading to improved employee performance and alignment with organizational objectives.

What is the Difference Between Traditional Training and Learning Journeys?

The key differences between traditional training and learning journeys can be summarized as follows:

Format and Structure:

  • Traditional Training: Often one-time, event-based sessions.
  • Learning Journeys: Continuous, multi-step processes.

Learning Approach:

  • Traditional Training: Typically focuses on immediate skill acquisition.
  • Learning Journeys: Emphasizes long-term development and application.

Customization:

  • Traditional Training: Generally one-size-fits-all.
  • Learning Journeys: Tailored to individual learning styles and needs.

Engagement and Interaction:

  • Traditional Training: Can be more passive in nature.
  • Learning Journeys: Encourages active participation and engagement.

Outcome and Impact :

  • Traditional Training: Aimed at knowledge transfer.
  • Learning Journeys: Focuses on behavioral change and performance improvement.

Why Should You Invest in Learning Journeys?

In North America’s animal kingdom, the coyote has demonstrated exceptional learning abilities, thriving in various environments. When Meriwether Lewis in the early 19th century first encountered a coyote on his famous exploration, he was perhaps the first of European descent to see one. He attempted to kill and collect it as a new specimen. He and his men were unsuccessful though – an experience that thousands of American hunters have shared since. The coyote has learned to adapt and thrive to constant changes in their ecosystem and are now a common sighting in large cities like San Francisco (California) and Salt Lake City (Utah).

In business, those who can learn are the coyotes – they can adapt and thrive to changing circumstances. Companies should find and develop coyotes in their organizations – employees who actively participate in their own learning journeys and contribute to the journey of their coworkers.

Benefits of Learning Journeys from a Business Perspective:

  • Customization for Strategic Alignment: Learning journeys offer highly customized programs designed to align with an organization’s key goals and objectives. They are structured to address specific enterprise challenges and opportunities, ensuring that the learning journey directly supports the business’s strategic direction.
  • Future-Proofing the Business: By structuring learning journeys around key enterprise goals, organizations are better prepared to face future challenges. This proactive approach drives both incremental and disruptive innovation, allowing businesses to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing landscape.
  • Improved Employee Engagement: Organizations that value learning and encourage professional development through learning journeys experience heightened employee engagement. Employees are more motivated and committed when they feel their growth is supported and recognized.

Benefits of Learning Journeys from an Employee’s Perspective:

  • Guidance for Skill Enhancement: Learning journeys serve as a GPS for individual learners, guiding them through the process of skill acquisition and proficiency development. They offer a clear path through formal and informal learning, helping employees enhance their skills and expertise.
  • Motivation and Awareness: Learning journeys provide motivation and awareness, inspiring individuals to take charge of their own development. They create a sense of purpose and direction, encouraging learners to proactively seek knowledge and growth opportunities.
  • Learning Consumption and Application: These structured journeys guide learners through the stages of learning consumption and knowledge application, ensuring that the acquired skills and knowledge are put into practice effectively.
  • Relevance to Career Aspirations: Learning journeys are highly relevant to individuals, assisting them in achieving their career aspirations. Whether it’s mastering a specific role or acquiring expertise in a particular technological domain, these journeys support individual growth and development.

Learning journeys offer a dual advantage, benefiting both the organization and its employees. They align learning and development with business goals, promoting innovation and engagement. From the employee’s perspective, learning journeys provide a clear path for skill enhancement, motivation, and relevance to career aspirations, ultimately driving continuous improvement and professional development.

Drawbacks of Learning Journeys

While learning journeys offer a comprehensive approach to professional development, they are not without their challenges. Here are some potential drawbacks:

Resource Intensive:

  • Designing a learning journey requires significant time and resources. This includes the creation of tailored content, monitoring progress, and providing ongoing support and feedback.

Can Overwhelm Learners:

  • The extensive nature of learning journeys may overwhelm some individuals, particularly if the content is dense or the pace is too fast.

Requires High Commitment:

  • To be effective, learning journeys demand a high level of commitment and self-motivation from learners, which can be challenging to maintain over longer periods.

Potential for Inconsistency:

  • In a diverse learning environment, ensuring a consistent experience for all learners can be difficult, especially if the journey involves various instructors or methods.

Dependence on Technology:

  • Learning journeys often rely on digital platforms and tools, which can be a barrier for learners with limited access to technology or those who are less tech-savvy.

Evaluation Challenges:

  • Measuring the effectiveness of a learning journey can be complex, as it involves evaluating progress over an extended period and across various learning formats.

Why Do Learning Journeys Work

Learning journeys function as a structured approach to professional and personal development. Here’s how they typically work:

  • Initial Assessment : Identifying individual learner needs and goals.
  • Customized Learning Path : Designing a personalized learning plan based on the initial assessment.
  • Diverse Learning Methods : Incorporating various formats like online modules, workshops, and real-world assignments.
  • Ongoing Support : Providing mentorship, peer interaction, and resources throughout the journey.
  • Continuous Feedback : Regular assessments and feedback to track progress and adjust the learning path.
  • Real-world Application : Opportunities for applying learned skills in practical settings.
  • Reflection and Adaptation : Encouraging learners to reflect on their progress and adapt their learning strategies.

This process ensures that learning is an ongoing, evolving journey tailored to each individual’s needs and goals, leading to effective skill development and personal growth.

How to Create an Effective Learning Journey?

The following are vital issues to consider when building learning journeys:

  • Consider the overarching vision, acknowledging that the future, though uncertain, is always present. Learning occurs over prolonged time and should never been something that employees stop doing, nor should organizations ever rest on their previous laurels. Integrating spaced learning and repetition into this process is crucial, as it greatly contributes to better knowledge retention, allowing learners to revisit and reinforce concepts at regular intervals, thereby solidifying their understanding and application in practical scenarios.
  • Awareness: Before employees can begin a learning journey, they need to be aware of what is available, how the organization will support them, and what lies ahead.
  • Motivation: While some employees are motivated for the pure sake of learning, some are looking for additional extrinsic motivations. Organizations should set up systems to reward progression in the learning process, encouraging employees to begin and continue the learning journey.
  • Participation and experimentation: Throughout the learning journey, employees need a safe space to participate, digest, apply, and experiment with the new knowledge they’re gaining through the learning journey. The experimentation and feedback loop are key to achieving behavior change.
  • On-going connects: Design learning journeys that include more than formal training events. Develop guides for managers to follow-up with employees on what they learned, implement social and mobile learning strategies, and allow employees to direct much of their own informal learning.

What are the Key Components of a Learning Journey?

A well-structured learning journey comprises several key components that work in tandem to ensure effective and engaging education experiences. These components are critical in shaping a comprehensive learning path that caters to diverse learning styles and objectives.

Needs Analysis and Goal Setting:

  • Identifying specific learning needs and objectives.
  • Setting clear, measurable goals for the learning journey.

Varied Learning Formats:

  • Incorporation of diverse learning methods such as online courses, workshops, and practical exercises.
  • Blending formal with informal learning opportunities.

Personalization and Flexibility:

  • Tailoring content to meet individual learner’s needs and preferences.
  • Offering flexible learning paths that accommodate different learning paces.

Continuous Assessment and Feedback:

  • Regular evaluations to track progress.
  • Providing timely feedback to guide and improve learning.

Application and Reinforcement:

  • Opportunities to apply learned skills in real-world scenarios.
  • Reinforcement activities to ensure retention and integration of new knowledge.

Support and Resources:

  • Access to necessary learning materials and resources.
  • Support from instructors, mentors, or peer groups.

These components collectively ensure that a learning journey is not only comprehensive but also adaptable, engaging, and result-oriented.

What Are Key Aspects that Would Help You Create Effective Learning Journeys?

Leverage the following aspects when developing learning journeys:

  • Start with the end in mind : Planning is too often abbreviated in the L&D field, a reaction to develop content as quickly as possible to please business stakeholders. Remember what Albert Einstein said about planning: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
  • Include all stakeholders:  During the initiation phase, include key stakeholders and ensure that everyone involved in the process has the information they need. Leaders should ask themselves the following questions: What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?
  • Build awareness of the solution with the target audience : Begin with primers to help them understand the big picture of the learning journey. Include an exposition on the current state, the desired future state, and the differences between those two states. Use microlearning hits that get to the point quickly.
  • Stimulate prior knowledge with which learners can scaffold new information.
  • Present content in the most appropriate modality.
  • Model learning strategies to help students assimilate new information.
  • Include as much application and practice as possible with healthy feedback loops.
  • Assess performance, giving additional feedback to learners.
  • Once learners are back on the job, use informal learning and coaching nudges to reinforce the application of new knowledge on the job. Employ performance support systems so learners can quickly find and share information they need in the flow of work.
  • Reward behavior change : While punitive rewards may be effective in the short term, for effective long-term behavior change, learning journeys should offer employees as much purpose, autonomy, and mastery as possible. Once employees are paid a fair and competitive wage, purpose, autonomy, and mastery are more effective methods of motivation than even bonus models.

Making It Work – EI’s Learning and Performance Ecosystem Based Approach to Create Effective Learning Journeys

EI has developed a highly effective model for creating effective learning journeys in a Learning and Performance Ecosystem . It’s a cyclical model that includes the following:

  • Capture attention about learning opportunities.
  • Explain what employees will gain from the learning journey (what’s in it for me).
  • Leverage immersive formal learning events that employ gamification, virtual and augmented reality, scenario based learning, and branching scenarios.
  • Support formal events with performance support tools, giving employees access to information in the flow of work : exactly what they need, when they need it.
  • Reinforce learning after formal events with safe places to practice and receive feedback on their performance.
  • Provide social learning so that learners can collaborate with others progressing in the learning journey, sharing knowledge and experiences.

Learning Journey Example: Sales Training

In our sales training program, we use the Learning and Performance Ecosystem framework to structure an effective learning journey for our team. Here’s how it aligns with the framework:

● Capture Attention : We kick off the learning journey by capturing the attention of our sales team about the upcoming training. This may include email announcements, intranet notifications, and engaging teasers to generate excitement.

● Explain the Benefits : We clearly communicate what participants will gain from the training journey. This includes improved sales skills, increased sales performance, and the potential for enhanced career growth.

● Immersive Formal Learning Events : We leverage immersive formal learning events that employ various cutting-edge techniques, such as gamification, virtual and augmented reality, scenario-based learning, and branching scenarios. These events make the learning experience engaging and memorable.

● Performance Support Tools : We provide performance support tools to our sales team, offering quick access to information in the flow of work. They can access product details, sales scripts, and negotiation tips exactly when needed.

● Reinforcement and Practice : After formal training events, we create safe spaces for our sales team to practice and receive feedback on their performance. This may involve role-playing exercises, simulated sales calls, and peer evaluations.

● Social Learning : We encourage social learning, allowing learners to collaborate with colleagues who are progressing in the training journey. They can share knowledge, experiences, and best practices, fostering a sense of community and continuous improvement.

This sales training learning journey not only equips our sales team with the necessary skills and knowledge but also keeps them engaged and motivated throughout the process. By aligning with the Learning and Performance Ecosystem framework, we ensure a comprehensive and effective approach to sales training that yields tangible results and benefits for both our team and the organization.

Parting Thoughts

Effective behavior change occurs over time as desired competencies and behaviors are reinforced through a blend of formal and informal training. Learning is not a one-time event. Professionals seek mastery of their trade, striving for autonomy and purpose. Learning journeys, thoughtfully developed and shared with employees, are an effective method of facilitating behavior change that aligns to enterprise goals and initiatives.

I hope this article provides the requisite insights on how you can use our unique Learning and Performance Ecosystem to create effective learning journeys and boost employee performance.

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True learning and implied behavior change requires a learning journey to boost professional development and achieve improved performance. In this article, we look at the link between learning journeys and how it can improve employee performance.

True learning and implied behavior change requires a learning journey to boost professional development and achieve improved performance. In this article, I look at the link between learning journeys and how it can improve employee performance.

What Is a Learning Journey?

Traditional training has often been viewed as a one-time event:  a  training class,  a  webinar,  a  learning module.

However, if the goal of training is a change in behavior, which leads to improved employee performance, training should, instead, be viewed as a learning journey – a series of learning events made up of a blend of formal and informal interventions, nudges, and follow-ups that ingrain new knowledge and behavior in employees.

  • Formal training is one of the key elements of a learning ecosystem that typically facilitates the learning acquisition.
  • As you add informal training (some initiated by L&D teams, some initiated by individuals and coached by leaders), you create a learning journey.

Why Should You Invest in Learning Journeys?

Learning is the key to thriving business.

In the animal kingdom of North America, the coyote has perhaps proven to be the most apt at learning and has therefore thrived. When Meriwether Lewis in the early 19 th  century first encountered a coyote on his famous exploration, he was perhaps the first of European descent to see one. He attempted to kill and collect it as a new specimen. He and his men were unsuccessful though – an experience that thousands of American hunters have shared since. The coyote has learned to adapt and thrive to constant changes in their ecosystem and are now a common sighting in large cities like San Francisco (California) and Salt Lake City (Utah).

In business, those who can learn are the coyotes – they can adapt and thrive to changing circumstances. Companies should find and develop coyotes in their organizations – employees who actively participate in their own learning journeys and contribute to the journey of their coworkers.

From a business perspective , learning journeys provide highly customized programs that are structured around key enterprise goals and objectives. Leaders should provide this insight to help prepare their organization for future challenges.

Not only does this help futureproof their business by driving incremental and disruptive innovation but it also improves employee engagement. Employees are looking for organizations that value learning and encourage professional development.

Organizations benefit from employees who continuously strive for improvement.

From the employee’s perspective , the learning journey acts as a GPS that guides learners in their efforts, through formal and informal learning, to perfect their art by acquiring new skills and proficiencies in business domains and technological mastery. These GPSs guide learners through motivation, awareness, learning consumption, and knowledge application.

Learning journeys comprise formal and informal learning – opportunities to acquire skills for a specific role or technological domain. They are highly relevant to the individual, assisting him/her with his/her career aspirations.

What Do You Need to Consider While Creating an Effective Learning Journey?

The following are vital issues to consider when building learning journeys:

  • Look at the  big picture  and consider that, while foggy, the future is ever present. Learning occurs over prolonged time and should never been something that employees stop doing, nor should organizations ever rest on their previous laurels.
  • Awareness : Before employees can begin a learning journey, they need to be aware of what is available, how the organization will support them, and what lies ahead.
  • Motivation : While some employees are motivated for the pure sake of learning, some are looking for additional extrinsic motivations. Organizations should set up systems to reward progression in the learning process, encouraging employees to begin and continue the learning journey.
  • Participation and experimentation : Throughout the learning journey, employees need a safe space to participate, digest, apply, and experiment with the new knowledge they’re gaining through the learning journey. The experimentation and feedback loop are key to achieving behavior change.
  • On-going connects:  Design learning journeys that include more than formal training events. Develop guides for managers to follow-up with employees on what they learned, implement social and mobile learning strategies, and allow employees to direct much of their own informal learning.

What Are Key Aspects that Would Help You Create Effective Learning Journeys?

Leverage the following aspects when developing learning journeys:

  • Start with the end in mind : Planning is too often abbreviated in the L&D field, a reaction to develop content as quickly as possible to please business stakeholders. Remember what Albert Einstein said about planning: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
  • Include all stakeholders:  During the initiation phase, include key stakeholders and ensure that everyone involved in the process has the information they need. Leaders should ask themselves the following questions: What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?
  • Build awareness of the solution with the target audience : Begin with primers to help them understand the big picture of the learning journey. Include an exposition on the current state, the desired future state, and the differences between those two states. Use microlearning hits that get to the point quickly.
  • Stimulate prior knowledge with which learners can scaffold new information.
  • Present content in the most appropriate modality.
  • Model learning strategies to help students assimilate new information.
  • Include as much application and practice as possible with healthy feedback loops.
  • Assess performance, giving additional feedback to learners.
  • Once learners are back on the job, use informal learning and coaching nudges to reinforce the application of new knowledge on the job. Employ performance support systems so learners can quickly find and share information they need in the flow of work.
  • Reward behavior change : While punitive rewards may be effective in the short term, for effective long-term behavior change, learning journeys should offer employees as much purpose, autonomy, and mastery as possible. Once employees are paid a fair and competitive wage, purpose, autonomy, and mastery are more effective methods of motivation than even bonus models.

Making It Work – EI Design’s Learning and Performance Ecosystem Based Approach to Create Effective Learning Journeys

EI Design has developed a highly effective model for creating effective learning journeys in a Learning and Performance Ecosystem. It’s a cyclical model that includes the following:

  • Capture  attention  about learning opportunities.
  • Explain what employees will gain from the learning journey ( what’s in it for me ).
  • Leverage  immersive  formal learning events that employ gamification, virtual and augmented reality, scenario based learning, and branching scenarios.
  • Support formal events with  performance support tools , giving employees access to information in the flow of work: exactly what they need, when they need it.
  • Reinforce learning after formal events with safe places to  practice  and receive  feedback  on their performance.
  • Provide  social learning  so that learners can collaborate with others progressing in the learning journey, sharing knowledge and experiences.

Parting Thoughts

Effective behavior change occurs over time as desired competencies and behaviors are reinforced through a blend of formal and informal training. Learning is not a onetime event. Professionals seek mastery of their trade, striving for autonomy and purpose. Learning journeys, thoughtfully developed and shared with employees, are an effective method of facilitating behavior change that aligns to enterprise goals and initiatives.

I hope this article provides the requisite insights on how you can use our unique Learning and Performance Ecosystem to create effective learning journeys and boost employee performance.

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How to Design an Effective Learning Journey

Explore best practices for how to create a learning journey and learn why this approach is crucial for a company’s leadership development strategy.

Publish Date: September 21, 2022

Read Time: 12 min

Author: Alex Smith

The traditional approach to learning journeys is no longer cutting it. Learning journeys have traditionally been designed to solve a leadership challenge over the course of a predefined time—6 or 12 months, for example. But at DDI, we know that learning journeys must be comprehensive and continuous over the course of a career and flexibly fit ever-changing leadership challenges. In this blog, I'll discuss why it's important for organizations to evolve their approach to learning journeys and shift away from "one and done" leadership programs. I'll also provide best practices for how to create learning journeys to support modern leaders in a fast-paced business world.

What Is a Learning Journey?

Traditionally, a learning journey has been defined as a unique plan that is founded on the challenges facing your organization and the most critical skills leaders need to achieve business success. It’s always been defined as an intentional, linear path to meet a business, leadership, or learning need. And it's sequential.

A learning journey has typically been designed for groups, cohorts, or communities of leaders. It takes place over time and incorporates a strategic mix of learning methods intended to meet the needs of today’s learner. It often begins with a review of relevant organizational and assessment data, the business drivers , and the target audience’s development gaps. L&D teams can use all of this information as the starting point for designing the learning journey.

While many elements of the traditional definition of a learning journey still ring true, learning journeys shouldn’t be completely linear. Learning journeys should still be designed to help a group of leaders solve broad organizational challenges. But it’s time to empower individual leaders within these journeys to take a unique pathway, outside of or in addition to the linear journey, to meet their personal learning or business needs.

Learning journeys must become more flexible and impactful as continuous, personalized journeys that follow the careers of the learners. And they shouldn’t track one path for all leaders. Learning journeys must be continuously analyzed and molded to fit the unique needs of each leader as their careers grow and change, always considering both the skills they uniquely need to grow and their preferred learning styles .

While journeys should be personalized to each leader’s unique learning needs, they must still be grounded in the context of the organization and highly connected to the overall goals of the business.

Reasons to Invest in Learning Journeys

It’s beneficial to invest in learning journeys because this approach to development ensures tight alignment with your organization’s strategies. Your leaders develop skills that are linked to your business needs, which has bottom-line implications.

According to DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2021 research, companies that use blended learning journeys compared to those that do not are 8 times more likely to have a highly-rated leadership development program, 5.8 times more likely to have a strong supply of leaders for critical roles, and 2.3 times more likely to be financially successful .

Additionally, implementing effective learning journeys can help companies engage and retain talent . Recent research from McKinsey shows that the top reason employees quit over the last year was because they lacked career development and advancement opportunities. If you’re not developing your people, they’re likely to head for the door. But not just any development will do. Make sure you’re following best practices for how to create a learning journey, which I’ll discuss more below.

Finally, effective learning journeys benefit leaders themselves. Simply put, when done right, learning journeys create better and more skilled leaders. And if you use blended learning strategies with group-based development or collaborative peer learning , leaders get the chance to network and build stronger relationships.

5 Best Practices for Creating Effective Learning Journeys

Now let’s jump into our five best practices for creating effective learning journeys. Learn how to ensure your learning approach is continuous, includes multiple modalities, has senior leader support, is personalized, and is data driven—and why it matters that you get these best practices right.

individual learning journey

1. Effective Learning Journeys Are Continuous

Recall the traditional way of thinking about a learning journey: a waterfall of activities that’s typically “one and done.” It’s linear and pre-planned from the start. But what we know after years of developing leaders is that the most effective learning experiences are continuous as the learner gains new skills and discovers new areas they need to develop.

Learning journeys today evolve and adapt without a short-term end date. There may be an intentional starting approach, for example, a journey to upskill leaders in leading their teams in a hybrid workplace . The bulk of that learning may occur over a specific time frame, but there are also interactive self-guided tools built in to sustain learning long after.

In addition, a journey like this includes flexibility to start and stop depending on what a leader may have going on, and the capability to choose a learning style that fits their needs. Learning journeys like this are continuous to address all the moments of need across a leader’s career—both expected and unexpected moments. For example, learning journeys support a leader in their transition from an operational leader to a strategic senior-level role. But when there’s an unexpected major shift in the business like a merger, their journey helps them learn the new core skills to succeed in their company’s new landscape.

This next best practice for how to create a learning journey covers why it’s so important for leaders to choose the modality that fits their learning style.

individual learning journey

2. Effective Learning Journeys Are Blended

We know from decades of surveying and talking with leaders that they prefer learning using a blend of modalities. This includes a mix of classroom learning with self-directed options and development assignments. We say that the magic is truly in the mix of modalities that work best for your leaders.

Plus, one thing we know as experts in learning and development is that people learn better when there’s variety in their learning journey . This variety keeps leaders’ engagement high and helps them make continuous new connections to concepts.

So what does variety of learning modalities mean? It means leaders have options to choose between virtual , in-person, or self-paced learning courses. Organizations can also offer microcourses , self-insight tools and assessments , games, simulations, and other digital tools to help leaders practice new skills on demand.

Offering a variety of digital and in-person learning experiences helps L&D professionals meet leaders in their moment of need . Meeting leaders in the moment means providing content and tools on a specific topic, challenge, or skill they need.

But sometimes digital or self-directed learning options get a bad rap because the right accountability structures aren’t in place for leaders. “Build it and they will come” is never an effective approach. However, there are ways to successfully implement self-directed leadership development. The key is that L&D professionals create a structure that makes learning happen better. For example, giving leaders time to process what they’re learning on their own, and then coming back together in peer learning groups to discuss what they learned. This is just one way to ensure self-directed learning sticks.

individual learning journey

3. Effective Learning Journeys Are Supported by Senior Leaders

When senior leaders understand the value of your program, they can also communicate and champion it to employees, making learners more likely to participate.

Having senior leaders as stakeholders who back your program can make all the difference. They can help ensure that your program is connected to your business strategy. And the more buy-in you have from the top, the more your program will be socialized within the organization. When it’s time for investment decisions about your program, senior leaders are more likely to feel ownership for current success. This can lead to more budget coming your way for expansion and improvements.

It’s also important to consider support where it matters most for your learners: their own managers should support their learning journey and development. This is a great article that offers strategies for securing manager support for leadership development .

individual learning journey

4. Effective Learning Journeys Are Personalized

Why does personalization make a difference for learners? When development is personalized, it feels relevant. Personalized development is relevant because it's also anchored on your business context. Leaders want to connect how their development will drive success for themselves as well as for the organization.

But personalizing a learning journey must be grounded in self-insight and data. Leadership assessments can provide leaders with data on their strengths and gaps. This data can be used to influence and bring focus to a leader’s learning journey—both at the individual and group level.

When it comes to personalized learning journeys , make sure that if it’s not completely evident to your leaders that it is personalized, you directly communicate it as such. I’ve seen leaders respond well to a message like, "This is personalized for you, and here's how we did that." Communicating that your programs are personalized can help with adoption. It can also create excitement for leaders to get started on development that was built especially for them!

individual learning journey

5. Effective Learning Journeys Are Data Driven

Being data driven allows learning journeys to be more flexible and adaptable, which is important in our ever-changing business landscape. Using data can help you pivot quickly and shift a learning journey to respond to major organizational changes. For example, self-assessment data from a company’s leaders who have recently completed a merger can show skill gaps in a newly formed group of leaders.

It’s also important to collect data at different points of your program to help you understand what’s working and what’s not. Knowing what’s effective can help you adjust the learning journey along the way according to the changing goals and needs of the learner—and your organization.

For example, measurement tools can be used to evaluate the program’s impact on your leader’s reactions, learning, and behavior change, and on organization-level metrics. Having data readily available on the impact of your leadership programs can help you highlight their success. And being able to prove the worth of your program can be crucial to sustaining your program (and your job as an L&D professional!) during disruptive times when budgets are under more scrutiny.

But more than that, being able to connect organization-level metrics to your leadership program metrics can help you see how the quality of leadership truly impacts company performance.

Implementing Effective Learning Journeys

Even the most thought-out learning journey can flop if it’s not implemented in the right way. So what are some best practices for implementing a learning journey?

We’ve already discussed some keys to implementation in this blog. It’s important to measure and track the results of your learning journey, including gathering data along the way. It’s also important to gain stakeholder engagement to help you influence, support, and accelerate your learning program.

Additionally, focus on creating a communication strategy to get everyone excited about their learning journey. This includes thoughtfully considering how you’ll kick off your learning program .

(For more on how to successfully implement your leadership development efforts, check out our Ultimate Guide to Leadership Development .)

In Conclusion:

Learning journeys done well create behavior change and adapt to change.

What a learning journey does best is create behavior change by reinforcing a blend of formal, self-guided, and peer-interactive development activities. Learning must be continuous to make progress toward mastery of competency areas.

But the best learning journeys are also flexible and open to change. After all, as the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau , said “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.”

Learning and development professionals have certainly gotten used to change over the past several years. Let’s remain adaptable to keep learning journeys relevant for leaders with constantly changing roles and challenges. 

Learn more about how to create a learning journey for your leaders .

Alex Smith is a consulting manager within DDI’s US Operations. He leads a team of consultants and is the engagement manager for several of DDI’s largest client partnerships across the globe.

Topics covered in this blog

  • Leadership Development

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Did you know that the Global Personalized Learning market is estimated to surpass $2 billion by 2024, growing at an estimated rate of around 29% from 2018 to 2024?

Personalized learning has emerged as a powerful educational approach that tailors instruction to meet the unique needs and preferences of learners. 

In today's rapidly evolving world, where individuals have diverse learning styles, interests, and skill levels, personalized learning has gained significant attention. 

This article explores the compelling benefits of personalized learning for individuals, highlighting how it can revolutionize the educational experience.

From boosting engagement and motivation to fostering deeper understanding and mastery of subjects, personalized learning offers a range of advantages that traditional one-size-fits-all approaches often struggle to deliver. 

By leveraging technology, adaptive assessments, and data-driven insights, personalized learning empowers individuals to take ownership of their learning journey, advancing at their own pace and focusing on areas that require attention.

What Are Personalized Learning Activities?

According to a survey, an overwhelming majority of L&D professionals, around 77% , recognize the critical role of personalized learning in driving employee engagement.

Personalized learning activities refer to educational experiences and tasks that are tailored to meet the individual needs, interests, and abilities of learners. 

These activities are designed to provide a customized learning experience for each student, allowing them to progress at their own pace and focus on areas that require attention.

Some examples of personalized learning activities include:

1. Adaptive Assessments

Assessments that adapt to the learner's responses, providing targeted questions and feedback based on their performance.

2. Individualized goal-setting

Setting specific learning goals and objectives based on each student's strengths, weaknesses, and interests.

3. Differentiated Instruction

Modifying teaching methods, materials, and resources to cater to the unique needs of each learner.

4. Project-Based Learning

Engaging students in hands-on, real-world projects that align with their interests allows them to explore and apply their knowledge.

5. Personal Learning Plans

Developing customized learning plans for each student, outlining their learning objectives, strategies, and progress tracking.

6. Online Learning Platforms

Utilizing digital tools and platforms that offer adaptive and personalized content based on individual learning profiles.

7. Peer Collaboration And Mentoring

Encouraging students to work collaboratively with peers , providing opportunities for peer-to-peer learning and mentorship.

These learning activities aim to create a more student-centered approach to education, empowering learners to take ownership of their learning and achieve optimal outcomes.

10 Compelling Benefits Of Personalized Learning

According to a survey conducted, a significant 94% of businesses acknowledge the vital importance of personalization in achieving their success.

Let’s have a look at the different advantages of personalized learning:

1. Enhanced Engagement

Personalized learning caters to individual interests, learning styles, and preferences, making the learning experience more engaging and enjoyable . 

When students have a say in their learning and can explore topics that interest them, they are more likely to be actively involved in the educational process.

2. Improved Academic Performance

Personalized learning enables educators to identify and address the specific learning needs of each student. 

By adapting instruction to individual strengths and weaknesses, students can grasp concepts more effectively, leading to improved academic performance and mastery of subjects.

3. Self-Paced Learning

Personalized learning allows individuals to learn at their own pace. 

Students can spend more time on challenging topics, ensuring a deeper understanding before moving on, while others can progress quickly through familiar material. 

This flexibility promotes individualized learning experiences and accommodates diverse learning speeds.

4. Targeted Instruction

With personalized learning, instruction can be tailored to address each student's unique needs, interests, and learning goals. 

Teachers can provide targeted support and interventions to fill knowledge gaps, ensuring that learners receive the specific assistance required for optimal progress.

5. Individualized Challenges

Personalized learning ensures that learners are appropriately challenged. 

Tasks and activities are designed to match each student's skill level , providing the right balance between achievable goals and stretching their abilities. 

This approach fosters continuous growth and prevents students from feeling overwhelmed or unchallenged.

6. Real-World Relevance

One advantage of personalized learning is that it allows individuals to receive real-world relevance. 

Personalized learning emphasizes the application of knowledge and skills to real-world contexts. 

By relating learning to practical situations and personal experiences, students develop a deeper understanding of how their education connects to the world around them, enhancing their motivation and relevance of learning.

7. Increased Autonomy

Personalized learning empowers individuals to take ownership of their learning journey. 

Students have more control over their learning, including setting goals, making choices, and monitoring their progress. 

This autonomy fosters self-regulation, independence, and a sense of responsibility for one's education.

8. Personalized Feedback

Personalized learning allows for targeted and timely feedback . 

Educators can provide specific feedback tailored to individual needs, addressing areas for improvement and recognizing strengths. 

This personalized feedback promotes self-reflection, a growth mindset, and ongoing skill development.

9. Boosted Confidence

One benefit of personalized learning is enhanced confidence.

Personalized learning recognizes and celebrates individual progress and achievements. 

When students experience success in their areas of strength and see their growth over time, it boosts their confidence, self-esteem, and overall motivation to continue learning .

10. Preparation For The Future

Personalized learning equips individuals with the skills and competencies needed to thrive in the modern world. 

It fosters critical thinking, problem-solving abilities, adaptability, collaboration, and effective communication skills, preparing students for success in higher education, careers, and life beyond the classroom.

These compelling benefits of personalized learning highlight its transformative impact on individuals, providing them with tailored educational experiences that promote engagement, achievement, and the development of essential skills for future success.

Read more about blended learning.

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Aligned with the 2030 vision of fostering lifelong learning, Oreed's offerings aim to build a comprehensive and personalized learning journey for individuals. 

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Final Thoughts

In conclusion, personalized learning offers a host of compelling benefits for individuals. It enhances engagement and motivation by tailoring education to individual interests and preferences. 

With improved academic performance and self-paced learning, students can achieve a deeper understanding of subjects at their own pace. 

The targeted instruction and individualized challenges of personalized learning ensure that students receive the support and appropriate level of difficulty they need. 

Real-world relevance connects learning to practical applications, while increased autonomy fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility. 

Personalized feedback boosts confidence and promotes continuous growth. 

Ultimately, the benefits of personalized learning equip individuals with the skills and competencies needed for future success, preparing them for the demands of higher education, careers, and life beyond the classroom. 

By embracing personalized learning, individuals can unlock their full potential, cultivate a lifelong love for learning, and thrive in a rapidly evolving world.

1. What is a personalized learning example?

A personalized learning example is a student working on an adaptive online learning platform that adjusts the difficulty level of questions based on their performance and progress. 

The platform analyzes their responses and provides targeted feedback, guiding them through personalized learning pathways tailored to their individual needs and learning goals. 

Another personalized learning example is a teacher creating differentiated assignments and projects for students based on their interests, learning styles, and skill levels. 

By offering choices and allowing students to pursue topics they are passionate about, personalized learning empowers them to take ownership of their education and engage in deeper, more meaningful learning experiences.

2. What is the goal of personalized learning?

The goal of personalized learning is to transform education by recognizing that each learner is unique and has specific needs, interests, and learning styles. 

It aims to move away from the traditional one-size-fits-all approach and instead tailor educational experiences to meet the individual needs of students. 

By personalizing instruction, content, pace, and assessment, personalized learning seeks to optimize learning outcomes and engage students more effectively.

The ultimate objective is to empower learners to take ownership of their education, foster their intrinsic motivation, and cultivate a lifelong love for learning. 

Through personalized learning, the goal is to create meaningful and relevant educational experiences that enable students to reach their full potential and acquire the skills, knowledge, and competencies needed for success in the modern world.

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Learning journey: Conceptualising “change over time” as a dimension of workplace learning

  • Original Paper
  • Published: 07 May 2022
  • Volume 68 , pages 81–100, ( 2022 )

Cite this article

  • Adeline Yuen Sze GOH   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4263-5712 1  

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Understanding how individuals learn at work throughout their lives is significant for discussions of lifelong learning in the current era where changes can be unpredictable and frequent, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite a corpus of literature on the subject of “learning”, there is little research or theoretical understanding of “change over time” as a dimension of individual learning at work. Increasing emphasis has been put on individuals’ personal development, since they play key mediating roles in organisations’ work practices. This article proposes the concept of the “learning journey” to explore the relational complexity of how individuals learn at different workplace settings across their working lives. In order to illuminate this, the article draws on the learning experiences of two workers with different roles at two points in time across different workplaces. The author argues that individual learning involves a complex interaction of individual positions, identities and agency towards learning. This complexity is relational and interrelated with the workplace learning culture, which is why learning is different for individuals in different workplaces and even for the same person in the same workplace when occupying different roles.

Itinéraire d’apprentissage : conceptualisation du « changement au fil du temps » en tant que dimension de l’apprentissage sur le lieu de travail – Comprendre comment les individus apprennent au fil de l’existence en milieu professionnel est important pour nourrir les débats sur l’apprentissage tout au long de la vie à l’époque actuelle où les changements peuvent être imprévisibles et fréquents comme l’illustre la pandémie de COVID-19. Malgré le corpus de littérature existant sur « l’apprentissage », peu de recherches ou de connaissances théoriques portent sur le « changement au fil du temps » en tant que dimension de l’apprentissage individuel sur le lieu de travail. On accorde de plus en plus d’importance au développement personnel des individus étant donné qu’ils assument des rôles de médiation essentiels dans les pratiques professionnelles des entreprises. Cet article présente le concept de « l’itinéraire d’apprentissage » pour examiner la complexité relationnelle de la façon dont les individus apprennent dans différents cadres professionnels tout au long de leur vie active. Pour éclairer ce propos, l’article s’appuie sur l’expérience éducative de deux salariés avec des rôles différents, à deux moments différents, sur des lieux de travail différents. L’autrice affirme que l’apprentissage individuel inclut une interaction complexe entre les points de vue, les identités et l’action personnels en matière d’apprentissage. Cette complexité est d’ordre relationnel et liée à la culture de l’apprentissage sur le lieu de travail, ce qui explique la raison pour laquelle apprendre diffère pour les individus en fonction du lieu de travail, et que même pour une seule et même personne apprendre sur son lieu de travail diffère en fonction des postes qu’elle occupe.

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Introduction

In today’s precarious global market economy, many countries are under increasing pressure to remain competitive and productive. The impetus to be competitive usually results in changes in work organisation, work structures and the labour market. Many countries promote lifelong workplace learning and encourage innovation as necessary strategies to address these changes (Yorozu 2017 ). Although a corpus of theoretical accounts of learning exists, there has been limited theorisation or discussion of what lifelong workplace learning might entail, especially in this period of uncertainty and disruption, when career progression is less linear than in earlier times (Akkermans et al. 2020 ; Arthur et al. 1999 ).

Drawing on data from a group of in-service vocational teacher trainees enrolled in a one-year training programme run by a local university in Brunei, this article proposes the concept of a “learning journey” to advance our thinking about change over time as a dimension of workplace learning. The article follows a conventional sequence, beginning with a review of the different theoretical perspectives about learning for work to illustrate the hitherto limited emphasis on lifelong workplace learning. This literature review is followed by the research methodology. Two case stories are presented to contextualise the findings, with a discussion considering the interrelationship of individual positions, identity and agency which deepens our understanding of learning throughout working life. The article concludes by underscoring the concept of a “learning journey” to conceptualise the change-over-time dimension of workplace learning as part of individual lifelong learning and the implications of this concept for advancing our thinking on the topic.

Learning for work and lifelong learning

Most countries’ policies and standard practices take an approach to learning for work that focuses on the early stages of a career. For example, initial teacher training and/or teaching practices precede employment as teachers; new doctors need to undergo a period of internship training before entering the profession; and apprentices learn on the job. Once able to perform satisfactorily, they are employed in the job. On a similar note, mature students returning to work are assumed to have completed the necessary training prior to (re-)entering the labour market. This front-loaded model of workplace learning, as the name implies, assumes that all the essential training needed for a lifetime of practice has been completed once the training programme is complete.

There are fundamental issues with the front-loaded model of training for work, which appears poorly aligned with the reality of today’s rapidly changing workplaces. First, proponents of this model tend to assume that initial training for a job will suffice for a lifetime of work practice. Hence, training is usually a one-off event. Second, it is assumed that a given job will last for a substantive part of a person’s life, or that people will stay in one role or job for the whole of their working lives. However, the reality of today’s uncertain economic climate is that changes in work demands, work practices and occupational structures are frequent and unpredictable. This stands in opposition to the front-loaded model, which assumes that the nature of work remains fundamentally unchanged.

Given this gap between models of initial education and the changing realities of work, we need to re-conceptualise workplace learning. Learning for work is no longer a one-off event; rather, it is a lifelong process where the workplace itself is one of the essential sites of learning. This also entails the processes of identity construction and transformation (Van Dellen and Cohen-Scali 2015 ; Filliettaz 2013 , Billett and Somerville 2004 ). Early studies focused on how workers develop their expertise through their ongoing experiences of work. For example, Chris Agyris and Donald Schön ( 1974 , 1978 ) write about how workers reflect on their own work experience to adapt to changing circumstances. Schön ( 1983 , 1987 ) goes on to immortalise the notion of the “reflective practitioner”, focusing on how workers consciously or unconsciously correct their practice in order to develop their expertise. Other writers like Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus ( 1986 ) focus on how workers develop their expertise through ongoing experience at work. Hubert Dreyfus ( 2001 ) later extended this work to emphasise the salient role of informal experiential learning. Victoria Marsick and Karen Watkins’ ( 1990 ) notions of informal learning and incidental learning also contribute to theorising workplace learning. Psychological theories have strongly influenced this body of research.

Following this early thinking, there was a shift of focus from workers themselves to the nature of work practices within the workplace, through which workers learn. This shift is evident in the range of socio-cultural and postmodern theories found in the workplace learning literature. Situated cognition theories (Brown et al. 1989 ), socio-cultural theories like those of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger ( 1991 ), and cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström 1987 , 2001 ) focus on the nature of work practices, which often overlook the individual workers within the workplace. The lack of emphasis on individual workers is a limitation of such theories, which largely draw upon the participation metaphor (Sfard 1998 ) whereby the history, agency and dispositions of individual workers are subsumed within the workplace context. Attempting to reintegrate individuals into social participatory processes, writers like Phil Hodkinson and Heather Hodkinson ( 2004 ) draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ), which views individuals as reciprocal parts of the social contexts in which they learn.

From a different perspective, Stephen Billett and Margarita Pavlova ( 2005 ) highlight how individual subjectivity and agency can help us understand individual engagement and learning through workplace practices. Billett ( 2011 ) argues that some accounts of learning place too much emphasis on social influences. He proposes that individual subjectivity, intentionality and identity are socially shaped over time. These roles contribute to individuals’ cognitive experience and subsequently influence their conceptions of what is later experienced. As Lave succinctly puts it:

There are enormous differences in what and how learners come to shape (or be shaped into) their identities with respect to different practices. … Researchers would have to explore each practice to understand what is being learned, and how (Lave 1996 , pp. 161–162).

This claim signals that it is important not just to study workplace practices, but also to understand how individual positions, dispositions and actions influence the way workers learn through participation in various practices throughout their working life – in other words, change over time. Theories such as Lave and Wenger’s communities of practice and Engeström’s activity theory struggle to provide a well-developed structure for understanding change over time as a dimension of workplace learning. They focus mostly on the learning itself, which takes either a timeless or a thin temporal slice of individual experience rather than a longitudinal perspective, and seldom explores or captures individual changes.

A few longitudinal studies focus on individual learning over a period of time. Martin Bloomer and Phil Hodkinson explored young learners’ dispositions to learning changes over a period of time through engagement in formal education. Based on this study, they developed the concept of “learning careers”, defined as “the development of dispositions to learning over time” (Bloomer and Hodkinson 2000 , p. 590). The concept of “learning careers” continues to be helpful for examining learners’ identities and dispositions for learning in various settings (e.g. Gallacher et al. 2002 ; Crossan et al. 2003 ; and Ecclestone and Pryor 2003 ). Whilst this concept may have currency in understanding changes in learners’ dispositions, it has been revisited by Hodkinson and his colleagues.

Three broad theoretical perspectives underpin the “learning careers” concept. First, the word “career” is used to refer to “any social strand of any person’s course through life” (Goffman 1968 , p. 119), where the strand involves learning. This assumption has been challenged by Phil Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) on the grounds that learning cannot be separable from other aspects of a person’s life, since most learning by an individual has many informal attributes. Second, learning is integral within social practices in any given situation (Lave and Wenger 1991 ), which contradicts the first perspective. It follows that the concept of “learning careers” does not refer to a separate isolated process within the given “location”. Finally, Hodkinson and colleagues draw on Bourdieu’s notion of “dispositions”, which depicts orientations and attitudes towards learning.

In extending the limitations of the concept of “learning careers”, Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) propose the use of “learning lives” rather than “learning careers”. The “learning lives” project aimed to understand the complexities of learning over an individual’s life course (Biesta et al. 2011 ). In agreement with Billett ( 2001 , 2011 ), Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) argue that it is equally important to understand the longitudinal dimension of an individual’s workplace learning within the broader context of their life. They emphasise people’s “learning lives” and see workplace learning as an essential part of these. In other words, they conceptualise workplace learning as part of a person’s wider living and learning throughout their life course. Recognising that living and learning to work run alongside each other as part of lifelong learning (Yorozu 2017 ), the present article aims to take this approach further, and to conceptualise how people learn in workplaces when roles alter or when people change workplaces. In the ever-changing world we live in today, understanding the dynamics of workplace learning is key in pursuing the United Nations fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote] lifelong learning opportunities for all” (UN 2015 , p. 14).

Methodology

This article draws on data from a completed case study of a group of twelve individuals learning to become vocational teachers in Brunei. The central aim of the original study was to understand how a group of in-service teachers learn prior to and during a one-year initial teacher preparation programme at a local university. The case study is framed within an interpretive qualitative framework which operates on the ontological assumption that “truth” or social reality is socially constructed by individuals (Lincoln and Guba 2000 ). As an interpretive researcher, I tried to construct a meaningful story from the participants’ point of view and at the same time maximise the benefits of my own experience and insights. My experience both as a student teacher and as a staff member in the same faculty influenced my pre-assumptions about how individuals learn.

I conducted my study at a local university in Brunei between 2007 and 2008. Ethical approval was granted through appropriate channels. All participants were fully informed of the purpose of my research, what the study entailed and the duration of the study, and each of them provided informed consent for their involvement in the study. Anonymity and confidentiality were assured for all participants of the study, including the use of pseudonyms for respondents’ names. Although I was a staff member in the same Faculty of Education at the time of my study, I was not involved in teaching the particular group of student teachers who participated in my study. In order to challenge my pre-assumptions about what I expected to find, I applied Harry Wolcott’s ( 1994 ) method of transforming qualitative data and Clark Moustakas’s ( 1990 ) heuristic method of analysis, which involves changing the data into something meaningful through immersion. I will return to this in the later part of the methodology section.

The group of twelve in-service teachers who participated in my case study had been teaching for at least one year in a vocational college prior to joining the programme at a local university. Footnote 1 During the programme, they returned to their workplaces for their teaching placements. In order to understand their learning journey, I asked participants to recall both their past teaching experiences in workplaces and their experiences during the teacher training programme. Fieldwork involved two rounds of data collection between 2007 and 2008.

Although the case study was carried out some time ago, my concern here is with questions that are not restricted to specific times, policies, or structural arrangements that might well alter considerably over ten or twenty years. One of the strengths of using a case study approach is to facilitate rich conceptual development where existing theories like the theory of learning cultures are brought up against complex realities. The data about the learning of these trainee teachers can help to generate new thinking and ideas. In this study of trainee teachers’ learning, the concept of a “learning journey” emphasises the interrelationship between individuals and learning cultures across their working lives, particularly with reference to the “change-over-time” dimension of their workplace learning. Such change might include the kind of experiences that the individual learners in my study have at each of their workplace settings and their relationship to these workplaces as their roles change.

Data collection

Data collection involved two semi-structured interviews with each participant, one at the beginning and one at the end of the initial teacher preparation programme. The interviews, which were digitally recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim, were conducted in English. They lasted on average 60 minutes and consisted of open-ended questions that focused on participants’ career decisions, learning in their workplaces and learning on the initial teacher preparation programme. In the first round of interviews, I asked participants about their workplace learning retrospectively. They were also asked to share their learning experiences as trainee teachers at their teaching placements, i.e. their workplaces.

The second round of interviews was derived from and informed by the analysis of the first round. These interviews, which lasted on average 60 minutes, included follow-up questions to take the interview to a deeper level by asking for more detail (Rossman and Rallis 2003 ), and also included questions that enabled participants to share their learning experiences from the programme. Due to the limited time frame and resources, I drew my case study data from trainee teachers’ interview data alone, which could be seen as a limitation. However, given the nature of my data and how they were collected, the participants’ perspectives were central to how I made sense of the specific learning cultures of their workplaces and their different roles, which subsequently influenced my analysis of the data. Moreover, I complemented my interview data with key documentation about the teacher training preparation programme. Collecting and analysing this material to provide an understanding of the context also subsequently confirmed my knowledge of the training of vocational teachers.

Data analysis

The process of data collection and data analysis was cyclical. Each stage of data analysis helped to inform the subsequent data collection, which focused on deepening understanding and examining in-depth experiences of the trainee teachers at their workplaces. The analysis of the data involved two stages. The first stage was carried out during the first round of interviews. I approached my interview data with reference to the three-stage process of description, analysis and interpretation to transform qualitative data (Wolcott 1994 ). The process of description involved drawing up individual case stories to obtain an in-depth understanding of each participant’s career decisions and learning in the workplace. I then subjected these stories to re-analysis in the light of data obtained from the second interview.

I also used Moustakas’ ( 1990 ) “heuristic analysis” to make sense of the data through immersion, then standing back and allowing the subconscious to work. Moustakas’ heuristic method provided a framework for guidance and clarification which helped to challenge my pre-assumptions from my own experiences. Sandy Sela-Smith ( 2002 ) acknowledges that this makes Moustakas’ method a valuable tool in the exploration of subjective human experience, especially the experiences of student teachers when they move from one context to another. My own personal experience as a student teacher and a staff member on the teacher training programme acted as a catalyst for inquiry. As Moustakas ( 1990 ) makes clear, the qualities of tacit knowing (Polanyi 1983 ) and intuition are crucial components of heuristic inquiry. Drawing on Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln’s ( 1989 ) version of the “hermeneutic circle”, analysis of the data involved moving between the parts and the whole. Neither of these could be understood without reference to the other, as “meanings c[an] only be understood in relation to a larger whole” (Hollway and Jefferson 2000 ).

Through immersion in the first and second interview transcripts, I wrote up case studies of individual student-teachers’ learning for each participant using a largely descriptive process incorporating significant sections of the original interview data to represent the individual’s own words. The main reason for writing up individual case studies for each participant was not just to produce a story for that individual, but also to understand how they learned to become a vocational teacher through engaging in different learning contexts across their career journey. In the second stage of analysis, I compared the twelve case studies in terms of issues, patterns, commonalities and differences, which is part of Moustakas’ ( 1990 ) heuristic research. The revealed patterns were examined, and themes began to emerge through a rigorous inductive and iterative process. The procedure also involved contextualising the data within a broader theoretical framework in the same research field. Here, the theory of learning cultures based on Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of cultural and other forms of “capital” (Bourdieu 1986 ) provided an overarching framework and a set of “thinking tools” to link the case studies with broader issues.

Revisiting two participants’ learning journeys

In this article, I focus on two individuals, Mary and Phillip, to explore their learning at their workplaces. Mary and Phillip were both training to become vocational teachers, but were, at the time of my study, at different stages of their learning journey, with different roles. These stages include their workplace learning as full-time teachers before enrolling in their teacher training programme (i.e. during their first few years of teaching) and their learning as in-service trainee teachers in their workplaces.

I have chosen Mary’s and Phillip’s stories for a specific reason. Research has shown that worker position, status, and the nature of work can influence individual learning and career development (Billett 2001 ; Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2004 ). This article aims to explore these differences and the individuals’ dispositions towards learning across the different learning cultures in which they participated. My findings show that the interrelationships between positions, identity and agency play a significant role in influencing workplace learning at different stages of becoming a vocational teacher. At the time of my study, Mary and Phillip were both in-service teachers in the early stages of their career, with different career trajectories. Although both had enrolled in the same teacher training programme, their approaches to learning differed. I argue that this difference is due to the interrelationship between individual positions and dispositions to learning and workplace learning cultures.

The following stories are constructed based on the interview data alone. These constructed stories are mine. One might argue that there are always different versions of personal stories that can be constructed (Stronach and MacLure 1997 ). For some researchers of a realist bent (Feuer et al. 2002 ), this might call into question the validity of my findings. My response to such critics is that, with qualitative data like mine, researchers do their best to tell a version of the truth as honestly as possible, and there is no doubt that some uncertainties will remain. Nevertheless, the credibility of the research is strengthened if other researchers working in a similar setting end up with similar stories. The credibility of the research then becomes a matter of coherence, as John Smith argues succinctly:

For interpretive inquiry, the basis of truth or trustworthiness is social agreement; what is judged true or trustworthy is what we can agree, conditioned by time and place, is true or trustworthy (Smith 1984 , p. 386).

Moreover, the findings from this study may also “ring true” in other settings. Readers can judge for themselves whether the analysis presented sounds convincing based on what they know of similar settings. In addition, I have established rigour in my research findings through a coherent methodology, i.e. by using case studies within an interpretive framework. Thus, the rationale for every stage of the methodology is made clear.

The interrelationship between individual positions, identity and agency in workplace learning

In order to contextualise the findings in this section, I will first provide case descriptions of Mary and Phillip to give some sense of “change over time” as a dimension of workplace learning as they change roles at their workplaces. Following this, I use the concepts of position , identity and agency that underpin the proposed “learning journey” to analyse and discuss these case descriptions.

Learning as a new teacher

Mary, a Malay woman, had been employed as a full-time tutor at nursing college. Prior to becoming a nurse tutor, she undertook training in the same nursing college before going overseas to further her studies. Upon graduation, she joined the staff of the college. Initially, she was appointed as a coordinator, a role which she felt she had been appointed to prematurely. Her colleagues, who were also her teachers at that time, had high expectations of her. Because she had a higher degree qualification, they appointed her as a coordinator straight away:

“Their high expectations have thrown me off the board … I wanted them to know that I have limited teaching experience … I didn’t think that I gave an impression that I knew everything, but they thought that being a postgraduate student, I should be knowledgeable. Some colleagues challenged me that way which in a way intimidated me. They would put up their wall …”

Mary had expected to be allocated a mentor who could guide her when she first joined the teaching staff, but she was not given one. She felt lost as she was provided neither with a curriculum nor a formal induction in how to deliver it. Despite this lack of support, she managed to develop her teaching skills through trial and error and chose to teach modules where she felt she could contribute. She also chose to take the initiative to learn from her colleagues:

“I made my initiative to come to some of the colleagues which I considered as a good teacher, to observe how they teach the subjects which I will be teaching. I sat in a few of their classes and I even co-teach with these teachers.” [emphasis added]

She also co-taught with another colleague whom she had the chance to observe before being given some lessons to teach herself. She remembered her first lesson, where she did not know how to begin or which teaching approach to use. However, she was able to draw on her past observations of her colleague, which helped her to continue with the teaching. In addition, she did have the support of a buddy system which consisted of junior tutors who had already been through the teacher training programme. As well as sharing resources, this buddy system allowed them to conduct “cross-teaching”, a new approach whereby all of them collaborated to deliver the curriculum across different levels, instead of just one level of any particular programme.

As a nurse tutor, Mary also had to teach in a clinical setting. She felt she lacked the clinical experience to be able to demonstrate practical knowledge of nursing, as she had not worked as a nurse:

“… my undergraduate degree has prepared me with a lot of practical experience but it is different when you are a nurse in the hospital. I am groomed strongly in theory, but theory is useless if you don’t know the practical side of it, which made me feel deficient.”

Mary therefore did not have a smooth transition into her first year of teaching. Instead, she had to be proactive in building social relationships with her colleagues and finding learning opportunities, since the college itself gave her limited support.

In contrast to Mary’s story, Phillip’s learning trajectory to becoming a vocational teacher went comparatively smoothly. Phillip, a middle-aged Chinese man, decided to go into teaching after working for several years as an engineer abroad. He developed an interest in teaching after mentoring some work-attachment (trainee) students at his engineering workplace. He was eager to join the teacher training programme to equip himself with the appropriate pedagogical skills. When he first joined his college, he saw himself as an engineer and a teacher:

“I see myself as an engineer and a teacher because I think it has to be together. For me you cannot be a good engineering lecturer unless you are also a good engineer in terms of your knowledge … keeping update with what is going in the industry, for example, and know what is happening in the industry is important …”

Due to his previous role as an engineer, Phillip would teach his students in the same way that he made presentations as an engineer to his clients. Unlike Mary, Phillip was allocated an unofficial mentor who helped him transition into his workplace. Phillip’s mentor was helpful and supported Phillip by sharing teaching resources with him. They would discuss different issues, and the mentor would challenge Phillip with difficult tutorial questions. Phillip was also given opportunities to be involved in developing the curriculum. He therefore had a chance to understand the content of each of the programmes.

Learning as a trainee teacher

During her enrolment in the teacher training programme, Mary found it useful to return to her workplace for her teaching placement every Monday to try out different teaching methods that she had learnt in the programme. Phillip was less keen to try out the methods he had learnt in the programme at his placements. Having taught in his college for the past three years, Phillip had already gained knowledge of the teaching approaches which were most useful to teaching his subject, and he was familiar with the type and level of his students. When introduced to new methods of teaching and learning, he therefore decided to continue what he had been doing before entering the programme:

“… I can see the point of using these methods, but I am not so sure whether I want to implement it all as much as [name of university lecturer] would like in my lectures … I will still use my own way of structuring my lesson and will do one for the university.”

Mary found it challenging to switch her role to that of trainee teacher at her workplace every Monday. She had to adjust to her role as a learner and learn to negotiate with her mentor, who was also the headmaster of her college, to observe her teaching. Her colleagues continued to see her as their full-time colleague rather than as someone who still needed time to acquire the full range of skills a teacher possesses. Mary therefore had to learn to be proactive in protecting her role as a learner when on her teacher training programme:

“Most of them view me as a professional colleague … They wanted to give me a lot of hours to teach ... I also need to be very assertive … or else I would end up 100 hours of teaching and top up with what I have to do here [university].” [emphasis added]

Like Mary, Phillip also continued to be seen by his colleagues as their full-time colleague. Unlike Mary, however, he also saw himself as a full-time teacher and continued to perform his role when given the usual administrative duties:

“… we have to supervise projects as well … and for this semester, I have to take on more teaching workload … I am also the timetable coordinator for the department ...”

Phillip had had the same mentor when he first entered teaching. However, he did not entirely follow his mentor’s advice:

“… he is helpful when he has the time. If I ask anything, he will help. He gives a lot of advice, maybe some of it I will use it. Although he has more experience than me, I still disagree with certain things he said … he has got his own points and views about certain things. For example, for assessments, he would do certain things certain ways, I would say ... there is another way of doing it … I find I don’t do everything he does, but I find his advice and guidance very helpful.”

“Learning cultures” and “dispositions”

Mary’s and Phillip’s stories illustrate how they learn at their workplaces with different roles. There is an extensive body of literature which shows how learning is situated. Lave and Wenger suggest that:

learning is not merely situated in practice – as if it were some independently reifiable process that just happened to be located somewhere; learning is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world (Lave and Wenger 1991 , p. 35).

Phil Hodkinson et al. ( 2007b ) prefer to understand the social practices through which people learn as “learning cultures”. Therefore, within any workplace, a learning culture exists. It follows that participation in different learning cultures will influence individuals’ lives differently (Biesta et al. 2011 ). What is equally important is the position of individuals in these workplace learning cultures, as these influence the way they perceive their work practices. Put another way, individuals have subjective perceptions called dispositions which are located within their objective positions. Dispositions are more than schemata of perceptions or beliefs. Rather, these perceptions derive from and are part of the whole person. Bourdieu uses the term “habitus” to capture all this, defined as a battery of dispositions accumulated through ongoing life experiences that are durable and transposable (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ). Individual positions influence learning in many ways. For example, social positions can be historical and geographical, or situated within particular learning cultures (see Hodkinson et al. 2008 ).

When Mary first joined her teaching job, she was in a better position than other newcomers like Phillip since she had herself once been a student of this college, i.e. her new workplace. She knew many of the lecturers, and was able to draw on her own student experiences to inform her teaching. In Bourdieu’s terms, she had both cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1986 ). Cultural capital is defined as the amount of knowledge relative to the learning culture. It is deemed valuable, since it usually determines whether a person will succeed (ibid.). Social capital is an individual’s network of relations with other people (ibid.).

Legitimate peripheral participation vs. being thrown in at the deep end

As a newcomer, Mary would normally be positioned at the periphery of the workplace community of practice and gradually learn the ropes before being given full responsibility for a task. Lave and Wenger ( 1991 ) refer to this as “legitimate peripheral participation”. Instead, she was thrown in at the deep end, like the teachers in Colin Lacey’s ( 1977 ) study. She was given limited support and no mentor, yet was expected to take on full responsibility. Her accrued cultural capital in terms of her subject knowledge and social capital from her student years did not help her to learn as a newcomer. They may even have created a barrier to her learning opportunities. Elsewhere (Goh and Zukas 2016 ) a co-author and myself have reported similar findings, which contradict Bourdieu, who states that having cultural capital makes one likely to succeed in the relevant field (Bourdieu 1986 ). We argue that cultural capital is not the only aspect that should be considered when trying to understand how individuals learn in a learning context (see also Goh 2014 ). Mary’s story clearly shows the opposite. In hindsight, it is worth noting that Lave and Wenger ( 1991 ) did not address the issue of newcomers having to take on full responsibility without being allowed to experience the process of legitimate peripheral participation. Mary’s story shows that newcomers are not always necessarily positioned at the periphery of a community of practice.

It is similarly worth noting that Hodkinson et al. ( 2007b ) did not explicitly discuss how individuals manage the transition from newcomer to full member in such a short timescale within a learning culture. The lack of time for this transition requires individuals to adapt quickly to the new role and the level of responsibility that comes with it. Mary’s account of her learning is similar to what Miriam Zukas and Sue Kilminster ( 2012 ) call the “critical intensive learning period”. This occurs when individuals are not treated as newcomers when transitioning to new areas of work and responsibilities, but are instead “thrown in at the deep end” and expected to be experts and act with full responsibility. Similarly, Hodkinson and Hodkinson’s research study ( 2003 , 2004 ) showed that when an experienced teacher changed to a new job, they were expected to be an expert from the outset. Unlike Mary, Phillip, who was positioned at the periphery and who lacked cultural and social capital in relation to his workplace, had a smooth transition into becoming a teacher with the support of his mentor.

Identity and changing roles

Due to Mary’s ambiguous position in relation to her workplace, she had a difficult transition period from learning as a new teacher to learning as a trainee teacher compared to Phillip. Within the literature, there is limited understanding of how the change of positions in relation to the workplace influences individuals’ learning. What emerges strongly from these two stories is that change over time through learning within the workplace is influenced by the change of roles from teacher to trainee teacher. Subsequently, the extent of this influence on individuals’ dispositions to learn depends on the tension between their “self-identity” (how they see themselves in relation to the situation) and how they exercise their agency when colleagues continue to see them as full-time teachers. Mary’s story reveals a marked tension between her “self-identity” and how she was viewed by her colleagues, which compelled her to exercise her agency to protect her learner status.

Identity can also be defined as a person’s disposition about themselves (Biesta et al. 2011 ). Defining it in this way allows us to think of identity as more than a cognitive concept, since most of the time we cannot articulate clearly who we are, and even if we are and do, much is left out. That is, our accumulated dispositions add up to more than how we think of ourselves. At the same time, how we see ourselves underpins many of our dispositions towards life.

The stories of Mary and Phillip illustrate the influence of early-career vocational teachers’ dual identities (Fejes and Köpsén 2014 ) on their learning journey. Phillip saw himself as an engineer as well as a teacher. He recognised the need to learn to teach whilst still keeping his vocational skills up to date with developments in the industry. Similarly, Mary stressed the importance of equipping herself with clinical skills, since these reflected upon her credibility as a nurse tutor. Mary saw herself as a nurse tutor much of the time, but she never explicitly talked about how her clinical nursing knowledge influenced her teaching. Mary talked on several occasions about teaching her students the importance of emotional care and the subtleties of caring for older patients. This illustrates the overlap between an individual’s identity and the roles they are called on to play. How individuals see themselves is linked to their roles in the workplace. The stories in this article show that it is important to understand both how newcomers view themselves and the expectations placed on them by other people in their role as new workers in the workplace, which tends to be overlooked in the literature.

Coping strategies

Mary and Phillip were both able to shape their responses to the situations they encountered in their workplaces in different ways. They responded differently based on the relationship between how they saw their own roles in their workplaces and how others saw them. Mary comes across as a very strong-willed person. She struggled to maintain her role due to the tensions between her identity and her position within the learning culture. As discussed earlier on, tensions arose when she saw herself as a new teacher, but her colleagues viewed her as an expert. Her colleagues had high expectations of her capability and therefore gave her minimal support in learning to teach. She was thus obliged to construct learning relationships (Goh 2013 ) with her “buddies” which allowed her to learn to teach by “cross-teaching” with them. Tensions also arose when Mary saw herself as a trainee teacher, but her colleagues viewed her as a full-time teacher. She had to be proactive in keeping her learner status in order to be able to learn in her workplace. These tensions were difficult to reconcile. They resulted in Mary having to exercise her agency in constructing or reshaping her work role and identity.

In Phillip’s story, there are several examples of tensions between his identity and his position when he returned to his workplace as a trainee teacher. Unlike Mary, Phillip saw himself as a teacher and was viewed as such by his colleagues, who gave him administrative tasks. He managed his tensions differently to Mary by being proactive in taking up these tasks. His actions and dispositions can be described as “strategic compliance” in satisfying the needs of his workplace. Phillip also exercised his agency when writing two sets of lesson plans: one to satisfy the university programme’s requirements and another reflecting the way he had been teaching prior to enrolling on the programme. Tensions arose when there was disagreement between Phillip and his mentor regarding teaching methods. In these instances Phillip was seen to be taking control of his learning.

As Mary and Phillip transitioned to a different level of work and responsibility involving a change of roles over time, they were required to practise some degree of agency in “negotiating their identity positions” (Eteläpelto et al. 2013 , 2014 ; Vähäsantanen and Eteläpelto 2009 , 2011 ; Goh 2013 ) in order to change work practices. This requirement creates differences in individuals’ dispositions to learning in their respective workplaces even among people with the same status of trainee teacher. Put simply, the difference in individuals’ learning results from the interrelationship between three concepts: position, identity and agency . Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische ( 1998 , p. 971) argue that agency is the “capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations”. Drawing on this idea, Gert Biesta and Michael Tedder see agency as “the ability to exert control over and give direction to one’s life” (Biesta and Tedder 2007 , p. 135). Biesta et al. ( 2011 ) argue that agency is the individual’s ability to change parts of their dispositions and/or their positions. The stories of Mary and Phillip clearly show that the variation in the exercise of agency depends on an individual’s identities, professional competence and relations to other professionals in the workplace (Vähäsantanen et al. 2009 ; Kersh 2015 ). In circumstances like those of Mary and Phillip where work roles and identity are not clearly defined for other workers, individuals need to exercise agency to establish their own professional identities (Eteläpelto et al. 2013 ). An individual’s agentic actions are akin to striving for distinction in order to survive and be successful (Bourdieu 1984 ).

The “learning journey”: the interrelationship between individuals and workplace learning cultures

The change-over-time dimension of workplace learning is seen when individuals change workplaces or change their roles within the same workplace over a period of time, which usually results in a change of work practices. Mary’s and Phillip’s stories illustrate that the interrelationship between individual positions, agency and identity is paramount to understanding an individual’s lifelong workplace learning. When Mary and Phillip changed roles within their workplaces, their positions changed in relation to their workplaces’ learning cultures. To cope with this, they were then required to exercise their agency which was largely tied to their identities. These findings concur with the argument of Anneli Eteläpelto et al. ( 2013 ) that in order to construct meaningful life courses we should focus on how individuals negotiate agency in work and life. To develop a robust conceptualisation of lifelong workplace learning, we need to explore the learning cultures of the different workplaces in which individuals participate. Learning can only be understood through the interrelationship of the learning cultures of workplaces and individuals.

At all levels, there is a complex interaction between individual dispositions and identity on the one hand, and individual positions in a range of workplaces on the other, each with its own learning culture. When the roles of Mary and Phillip changed from teacher to trainee teacher, the learning cultures within their workplaces also shifted. Their stories illustrate the importance of individual positions and dispositions in relation to practices within the workplace (Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2004 ; Goh 2021 ). This study also reconfirms Hodkinson’s concepts of “learning careers” and “learning lives”, since it shows that individuals’ dispositions to learning can develop and change over time through interaction with different learning cultures across the lifespan. Simultaneously, learning cultures within the workplace can change over time, which often results in either continuity or changes in practices.

Mary’s and Phillip’s actions and dispositions to learning exist in relation to many other factors which influence the learning cultures of their workplaces. Their learning was also dependent on and shaped by workplace affordances , which are constituted by workplace hierarchies, contestation and personal relations (Billett 2001 ). On the other hand, the learning opportunities that an individual can see in their workplace are limited by the position they occupy and the horizons that are visible from that position. Hodkinson et al. prefer to describe this as an individual’s “horizon of learning”. That is,

… in any situation there are opportunities to learn. What those opportunities are, and the ways in which the process of learning takes place, depends on the nature of the learning culture and of the position, habitus and capitals of the individuals, in interaction with each other in their horizons for learning, as part of a field of relationships (Hodkinson et al. 2008 , p. 41).

This process, a kind of “learning to become”, also depends on the individual’s receptiveness and the extent to which s/he is able to recognise the learning support available from others, in order to maintain individual engagement with the activities for continuing development. When tensions surfaced, Mary was able to leverage her buddy system to learn to teach. Anne Edwards ( 2015 ) calls this “relational agency”, referring to individuals’ capacity to be receptive and engage with others as resources.

Learning as becoming

Mary’s and Phillip’s learning to “become” involved a change in roles within the same workplace. They needed to (re)negotiate their identities in different circumstances, which depended partly on how their colleagues saw them and partly on how they themselves saw their changing roles. Lesley Scanlon ( 2011 ) argues that the process of “becoming” involves individuals rehearsing their “possible or provisional selves” (Ibarra 1999 ). In line with other scholars (Billett 2011 ; Harteis and Goller 2014 ; Vähäsantanen et al. 2017 ), the stories of Mary and Phillip highlight that individual agency is crucial in the formation of individuals’ learning and the development of professional identities where learning and practice are relational (Billett 2010 ).

Given the complexity of the interrelationship between individuals and their context, individuals’ lifelong workplace learning can be viewed as a journey, which considers individuals’ learning as becoming through participating in different learning cultures longitudinally throughout the entire length of their life. Mary and Phillip continued to learn throughout their working life, and thus continued to “become”. This process of “learning to become” can be one of change or of continuity, depending on the individual’s changing roles and positions. Individuals are always “becoming” through continuous learning experiences which become a part of them (Jarvis 2007 ), and which either reinforce or change their dispositions. This study shows that individuals learn to become through exercising their agency in different ways, either changing or reinforcing their practices in the workplace. This in turn illustrates that individuals can only learn to become through participating in the practices within their learning cultures.

The concept of a “learning journey” is useful in researching individuals’ change over time as a dimension of workplace learning, which involves either a change of workplaces or a change of role within the workplace. A learning journey highlights the significance of the interrelationship between individual dispositions and ever-changing learning contexts (in this case, Mary’s and Phillip’s different workplaces). The learning journey considers the complex interrelationships between individual agency, positions and identity, which vary between individuals, at different times and in different situations. This highlights the need for lifelong learning policies to consider individual responsibility for learning and workplace affordances (Billett 2001 ), while also taking account of the necessity of informal learning (Marsick and Watkins 1990 ).

The concept of a “learning journey” addresses the limitations of existing workplace learning theories which overlook the perspectives of either the individual learner or the workplaces. It does this by signifying the importance of individual learners and their habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ) where learning is embodied, rather than simplistically trying to understand learning by looking only at the work practices within a work organisation. The concept of a “learning journey” is timely since it helps us to reconsider change over time as a dimension of workplace learning, in ways which look beyond the traditional linear career progression in this unpredictable postmodern era. It brings a fresh perspective on how individual lifelong workplace learning can be supported through unprecedented and disruptive events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

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GOH, A.Y. Learning journey: Conceptualising “change over time” as a dimension of workplace learning. Int Rev Educ 68 , 81–100 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-022-09942-0

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The Importance of a Learning Journey

The pursuit of knowledge has the power to transform us. A learning journey nurtures this curiosity of transformation in the learners. It offers continued learning and ensures continued growth. It uses tools that can also help learners navigate the terrain to keep learners going. One can use a it to discover what to learn, how to learn, and what they are good at. Once they understand this, they can easily use the tools and techniques provided by a learning journey to improve their knowledge.

Table of Contents

What is a learning journey, why is a learning journey important, how do you create a learning journey, how to implement it, benefits of the learning journey, infographic, knowledge check , frequently asked questions (faqs), what is the learning journey, what is an employee learning journey.

The term learning journey refers to a planned learning experience that takes place over time and includes various learning aspects and experiences using multiple techniques and platforms. Instructional designers create a learning journey to identify the appropriate format and methodology of learning. A well-structured learning journey can help the learners to achieve the objectives effectively, ensure learning implementation, and initiate actual behavioral change .

It caters to the leadership style, culture, specific needs of any organization , and the preferences of the learner’s leadership level. It also shows a more straightforward path to the learners’ learning goals, demonstrating a starting point and structured progress to help them achieve the objectives effectively. Organizations take the help of a learning journey to navigate their employees into a well-structured training process.

Organizations that employ a mixed learning journey are 2.5 times more likely to be financially successful than those that use more conventional learning approaches. (Source: DDI, Global Leadership Forecast).

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Learners find the structure provided by the learning journey very helpful. It clarifies what people should do next and how much time they should set aside. It offers a high level of flexibility around where and when they should study, together with the multiple modes and channels for learning, which help embed essential skills rapidly and effectively.

The knowledge, study, and research abilities that learners bring to the learning process make up their learning journey. Since instructors are involved in designing and evaluating their education, it also offers a structural method to the learners and the instructors who are shaping the module. Instructional designers create a well-aligned learning module using a it.

In order to create a successful learning journey that is well-aligned with the organization, instructional designers try to:

  • Bring attention to the prospects for learning:  The goal can only be achievable when the learners understand why this learning is essential. Only then can the organizations promote a healthy learning environment .
  • Describe the benefits for the employees: Adult learners are encouraged intrinsically with self-esteem, desire for a better quality of life, self-development, and recognition. Therefore, instructors must plan a well-aligned learning journey according to that.
  • Use gamification , virtual and augmented reality, scenario-based learning, and branching scenarios like immersive formal learning. The effectiveness of immersive learning has been demonstrated, with assignments finished on schedule. As a result, compared to other conventional learning approaches , this style of education has a higher likelihood of producing successful results. Immersive learners always develop more extraordinary cognitive abilities than traditional learners. They exhibit better problem-solving skills, better memory, and higher attention control.
  • Provide employees with access to information during work so, they know what they need when needed.
  • Support formal events with performance support tools.
  • Reinforce learning by providing opportunities for practice, follow-up tools, and constructive criticism.
  • Offer social learning so learners can interact with those who are also learning and advancing while exchanging information and experiences. As adult learners, they are instrumental in their learning process. They are more proactive in doing the work needed to facilitate learning and drive the learning process based on what they think they have to succeed on the job . Learners bring a greater volume, quality of experience, and rich resources to one another.

The Importance of a Learning Journey

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Instructional designers can implement it like this:

  • First, they should assess the employees’ current skill levels based on the organization’s competency model. Finding and concentrating on the essential leadership skill gaps is the first step in a precise diagnosis.
  • Then, learning should be applied and tested through computer-based business simulations customized to the organization’s specific needs. Simulation exercises ensure that concepts learned during the learning event apply to the organization’s real-world issues.
  • Next, they can use follow-up tools to support continuing learning with additional content, case studies , and community leader boards to encourage the new learners. It utilizes several measurement techniques to quantify the effectiveness of the talent development program.

It has the following advantages:

  • It helps the learners to navigate appropriately. It helps them to gain knowledge independently.
  • A well-aligned learning journey brings additional structure to a learning system. It provides a structured environment that helps to maintain discipline in the learning process.
  • It enables self-paced learning for the learners. It generates an individualized experience. It helps learners undertake the courses at their own pace, according to their needs. It gives the learners freedom in their choices.
  • It makes it easier to define and pursue goals. It generates an achievable goal for the learners and motivates them to achieve it.
  • It helps accelerate the learning and development goals of the employees as well as of the organizations.
  • It saves admin time.
  • It promotes a continuous feedback method that reevaluates the purpose of the journey.
  • It makes learning a continuous process, a journey indeed.
  • It offers to learn in small chunks. Small amounts are better for retention. It allows learners to remember and relearn the materials at their convenience.

Learning journey

Learning Journey

  • To allow learners a competitive edge.
  • To provide structured learning experience.
  • To offer creativity.
  • To make feedback more immediate.
  • Finding and concentrating on the essential skill gaps in the organization.
  • Communicating with the employees/stakeholders.
  • Imposing a general training and development journey.

With the help of a learning journey, one can evaluate a learner’s progress, clarifying what they should accomplish next and how much time they should allot for it. Learners’ ability to self-evaluate their learning progress makes the learning process independent. Employee learning journeys consist of a number of distinct learning experiences that are spread out over time, utilizing various methods and delivery modalities and leading to the acquisition of new knowledge, skills, or behavioral changes at the end of the journey.

The term learning journey refers to a planned learning experience that takes place over time and includes various learning aspects and experiences using multiple techniques and platforms.

In order to create a successful learning journey that is well-aligned with the organization, instructional designers always keep the end goal in mind, recognize the gaps, extend learning over development-related activities, involve the learners to direct management, calculate the effects, and plan for flawless execution.

With the help of learning journeys, one can evaluate a learner’s progress, clarifying what they should accomplish next and how much time they should allot for it.

Employee learning journeys consist of a number of distinct learning experiences that are spread out over time, utilizing various methods and delivery modalities and leading to the acquisition of new knowledge, skills, or behavioral changes at the end of the journey.

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Learning journey: Conceptualising “change over time” as a dimension of workplace learning

Adeline yuen sze goh.

Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Gadong, Brunei

Understanding how individuals learn at work throughout their lives is significant for discussions of lifelong learning in the current era where changes can be unpredictable and frequent, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite a corpus of literature on the subject of “learning”, there is little research or theoretical understanding of “change over time” as a dimension of individual learning at work. Increasing emphasis has been put on individuals’ personal development, since they play key mediating roles in organisations’ work practices. This article proposes the concept of the “learning journey” to explore the relational complexity of how individuals learn at different workplace settings across their working lives. In order to illuminate this, the article draws on the learning experiences of two workers with different roles at two points in time across different workplaces. The author argues that individual learning involves a complex interaction of individual positions, identities and agency towards learning. This complexity is relational and interrelated with the workplace learning culture, which is why learning is different for individuals in different workplaces and even for the same person in the same workplace when occupying different roles.

Résumé

Itinéraire d’apprentissage : conceptualisation du « changement au fil du temps » en tant que dimension de l’apprentissage sur le lieu de travail – Comprendre comment les individus apprennent au fil de l’existence en milieu professionnel est important pour nourrir les débats sur l’apprentissage tout au long de la vie à l’époque actuelle où les changements peuvent être imprévisibles et fréquents comme l’illustre la pandémie de COVID-19. Malgré le corpus de littérature existant sur « l’apprentissage », peu de recherches ou de connaissances théoriques portent sur le « changement au fil du temps » en tant que dimension de l’apprentissage individuel sur le lieu de travail. On accorde de plus en plus d’importance au développement personnel des individus étant donné qu’ils assument des rôles de médiation essentiels dans les pratiques professionnelles des entreprises. Cet article présente le concept de « l’itinéraire d’apprentissage » pour examiner la complexité relationnelle de la façon dont les individus apprennent dans différents cadres professionnels tout au long de leur vie active. Pour éclairer ce propos, l’article s’appuie sur l’expérience éducative de deux salariés avec des rôles différents, à deux moments différents, sur des lieux de travail différents. L’autrice affirme que l’apprentissage individuel inclut une interaction complexe entre les points de vue, les identités et l’action personnels en matière d’apprentissage. Cette complexité est d’ordre relationnel et liée à la culture de l’apprentissage sur le lieu de travail, ce qui explique la raison pour laquelle apprendre diffère pour les individus en fonction du lieu de travail, et que même pour une seule et même personne apprendre sur son lieu de travail diffère en fonction des postes qu’elle occupe.

Introduction

In today’s precarious global market economy, many countries are under increasing pressure to remain competitive and productive. The impetus to be competitive usually results in changes in work organisation, work structures and the labour market. Many countries promote lifelong workplace learning and encourage innovation as necessary strategies to address these changes (Yorozu 2017 ). Although a corpus of theoretical accounts of learning exists, there has been limited theorisation or discussion of what lifelong workplace learning might entail, especially in this period of uncertainty and disruption, when career progression is less linear than in earlier times (Akkermans et al. 2020 ; Arthur et al. 1999 ).

Drawing on data from a group of in-service vocational teacher trainees enrolled in a one-year training programme run by a local university in Brunei, this article proposes the concept of a “learning journey” to advance our thinking about change over time as a dimension of workplace learning. The article follows a conventional sequence, beginning with a review of the different theoretical perspectives about learning for work to illustrate the hitherto limited emphasis on lifelong workplace learning. This literature review is followed by the research methodology. Two case stories are presented to contextualise the findings, with a discussion considering the interrelationship of individual positions, identity and agency which deepens our understanding of learning throughout working life. The article concludes by underscoring the concept of a “learning journey” to conceptualise the change-over-time dimension of workplace learning as part of individual lifelong learning and the implications of this concept for advancing our thinking on the topic.

Learning for work and lifelong learning

Most countries’ policies and standard practices take an approach to learning for work that focuses on the early stages of a career. For example, initial teacher training and/or teaching practices precede employment as teachers; new doctors need to undergo a period of internship training before entering the profession; and apprentices learn on the job. Once able to perform satisfactorily, they are employed in the job. On a similar note, mature students returning to work are assumed to have completed the necessary training prior to (re-)entering the labour market. This front-loaded model of workplace learning, as the name implies, assumes that all the essential training needed for a lifetime of practice has been completed once the training programme is complete.

There are fundamental issues with the front-loaded model of training for work, which appears poorly aligned with the reality of today’s rapidly changing workplaces. First, proponents of this model tend to assume that initial training for a job will suffice for a lifetime of work practice. Hence, training is usually a one-off event. Second, it is assumed that a given job will last for a substantive part of a person’s life, or that people will stay in one role or job for the whole of their working lives. However, the reality of today’s uncertain economic climate is that changes in work demands, work practices and occupational structures are frequent and unpredictable. This stands in opposition to the front-loaded model, which assumes that the nature of work remains fundamentally unchanged.

Given this gap between models of initial education and the changing realities of work, we need to re-conceptualise workplace learning. Learning for work is no longer a one-off event; rather, it is a lifelong process where the workplace itself is one of the essential sites of learning. This also entails the processes of identity construction and transformation (Van Dellen and Cohen-Scali 2015 ; Filliettaz 2013 , Billett and Somerville 2004 ). Early studies focused on how workers develop their expertise through their ongoing experiences of work. For example, Chris Agyris and Donald Schön ( 1974 , 1978 ) write about how workers reflect on their own work experience to adapt to changing circumstances. Schön ( 1983 , 1987 ) goes on to immortalise the notion of the “reflective practitioner”, focusing on how workers consciously or unconsciously correct their practice in order to develop their expertise. Other writers like Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus ( 1986 ) focus on how workers develop their expertise through ongoing experience at work. Hubert Dreyfus ( 2001 ) later extended this work to emphasise the salient role of informal experiential learning. Victoria Marsick and Karen Watkins’ ( 1990 ) notions of informal learning and incidental learning also contribute to theorising workplace learning. Psychological theories have strongly influenced this body of research.

Following this early thinking, there was a shift of focus from workers themselves to the nature of work practices within the workplace, through which workers learn. This shift is evident in the range of socio-cultural and postmodern theories found in the workplace learning literature. Situated cognition theories (Brown et al. 1989 ), socio-cultural theories like those of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger ( 1991 ), and cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström 1987 , 2001 ) focus on the nature of work practices, which often overlook the individual workers within the workplace. The lack of emphasis on individual workers is a limitation of such theories, which largely draw upon the participation metaphor (Sfard 1998 ) whereby the history, agency and dispositions of individual workers are subsumed within the workplace context. Attempting to reintegrate individuals into social participatory processes, writers like Phil Hodkinson and Heather Hodkinson ( 2004 ) draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ), which views individuals as reciprocal parts of the social contexts in which they learn.

From a different perspective, Stephen Billett and Margarita Pavlova ( 2005 ) highlight how individual subjectivity and agency can help us understand individual engagement and learning through workplace practices. Billett ( 2011 ) argues that some accounts of learning place too much emphasis on social influences. He proposes that individual subjectivity, intentionality and identity are socially shaped over time. These roles contribute to individuals’ cognitive experience and subsequently influence their conceptions of what is later experienced. As Lave succinctly puts it:

There are enormous differences in what and how learners come to shape (or be shaped into) their identities with respect to different practices. … Researchers would have to explore each practice to understand what is being learned, and how (Lave 1996 , pp. 161–162).

This claim signals that it is important not just to study workplace practices, but also to understand how individual positions, dispositions and actions influence the way workers learn through participation in various practices throughout their working life – in other words, change over time. Theories such as Lave and Wenger’s communities of practice and Engeström’s activity theory struggle to provide a well-developed structure for understanding change over time as a dimension of workplace learning. They focus mostly on the learning itself, which takes either a timeless or a thin temporal slice of individual experience rather than a longitudinal perspective, and seldom explores or captures individual changes.

A few longitudinal studies focus on individual learning over a period of time. Martin Bloomer and Phil Hodkinson explored young learners’ dispositions to learning changes over a period of time through engagement in formal education. Based on this study, they developed the concept of “learning careers”, defined as “the development of dispositions to learning over time” (Bloomer and Hodkinson 2000 , p. 590). The concept of “learning careers” continues to be helpful for examining learners’ identities and dispositions for learning in various settings (e.g. Gallacher et al. 2002 ; Crossan et al. 2003 ; and Ecclestone and Pryor 2003 ). Whilst this concept may have currency in understanding changes in learners’ dispositions, it has been revisited by Hodkinson and his colleagues.

Three broad theoretical perspectives underpin the “learning careers” concept. First, the word “career” is used to refer to “any social strand of any person’s course through life” (Goffman 1968 , p. 119), where the strand involves learning. This assumption has been challenged by Phil Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) on the grounds that learning cannot be separable from other aspects of a person’s life, since most learning by an individual has many informal attributes. Second, learning is integral within social practices in any given situation (Lave and Wenger 1991 ), which contradicts the first perspective. It follows that the concept of “learning careers” does not refer to a separate isolated process within the given “location”. Finally, Hodkinson and colleagues draw on Bourdieu’s notion of “dispositions”, which depicts orientations and attitudes towards learning.

In extending the limitations of the concept of “learning careers”, Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) propose the use of “learning lives” rather than “learning careers”. The “learning lives” project aimed to understand the complexities of learning over an individual’s life course (Biesta et al. 2011 ). In agreement with Billett ( 2001 , 2011 ), Hodkinson et al. ( 2007a ) argue that it is equally important to understand the longitudinal dimension of an individual’s workplace learning within the broader context of their life. They emphasise people’s “learning lives” and see workplace learning as an essential part of these. In other words, they conceptualise workplace learning as part of a person’s wider living and learning throughout their life course. Recognising that living and learning to work run alongside each other as part of lifelong learning (Yorozu 2017 ), the present article aims to take this approach further, and to conceptualise how people learn in workplaces when roles alter or when people change workplaces. In the ever-changing world we live in today, understanding the dynamics of workplace learning is key in pursuing the United Nations fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote] lifelong learning opportunities for all” (UN 2015 , p. 14).

Methodology

This article draws on data from a completed case study of a group of twelve individuals learning to become vocational teachers in Brunei. The central aim of the original study was to understand how a group of in-service teachers learn prior to and during a one-year initial teacher preparation programme at a local university. The case study is framed within an interpretive qualitative framework which operates on the ontological assumption that “truth” or social reality is socially constructed by individuals (Lincoln and Guba 2000 ). As an interpretive researcher, I tried to construct a meaningful story from the participants’ point of view and at the same time maximise the benefits of my own experience and insights. My experience both as a student teacher and as a staff member in the same faculty influenced my pre-assumptions about how individuals learn.

I conducted my study at a local university in Brunei between 2007 and 2008. Ethical approval was granted through appropriate channels. All participants were fully informed of the purpose of my research, what the study entailed and the duration of the study, and each of them provided informed consent for their involvement in the study. Anonymity and confidentiality were assured for all participants of the study, including the use of pseudonyms for respondents’ names. Although I was a staff member in the same Faculty of Education at the time of my study, I was not involved in teaching the particular group of student teachers who participated in my study. In order to challenge my pre-assumptions about what I expected to find, I applied Harry Wolcott’s ( 1994 ) method of transforming qualitative data and Clark Moustakas’s ( 1990 ) heuristic method of analysis, which involves changing the data into something meaningful through immersion. I will return to this in the later part of the methodology section.

The group of twelve in-service teachers who participated in my case study had been teaching for at least one year in a vocational college prior to joining the programme at a local university. 1 During the programme, they returned to their workplaces for their teaching placements. In order to understand their learning journey, I asked participants to recall both their past teaching experiences in workplaces and their experiences during the teacher training programme. Fieldwork involved two rounds of data collection between 2007 and 2008.

Although the case study was carried out some time ago, my concern here is with questions that are not restricted to specific times, policies, or structural arrangements that might well alter considerably over ten or twenty years. One of the strengths of using a case study approach is to facilitate rich conceptual development where existing theories like the theory of learning cultures are brought up against complex realities. The data about the learning of these trainee teachers can help to generate new thinking and ideas. In this study of trainee teachers’ learning, the concept of a “learning journey” emphasises the interrelationship between individuals and learning cultures across their working lives, particularly with reference to the “change-over-time” dimension of their workplace learning. Such change might include the kind of experiences that the individual learners in my study have at each of their workplace settings and their relationship to these workplaces as their roles change.

Data collection

Data collection involved two semi-structured interviews with each participant, one at the beginning and one at the end of the initial teacher preparation programme. The interviews, which were digitally recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim, were conducted in English. They lasted on average 60 minutes and consisted of open-ended questions that focused on participants’ career decisions, learning in their workplaces and learning on the initial teacher preparation programme. In the first round of interviews, I asked participants about their workplace learning retrospectively. They were also asked to share their learning experiences as trainee teachers at their teaching placements, i.e. their workplaces.

The second round of interviews was derived from and informed by the analysis of the first round. These interviews, which lasted on average 60 minutes, included follow-up questions to take the interview to a deeper level by asking for more detail (Rossman and Rallis 2003 ), and also included questions that enabled participants to share their learning experiences from the programme. Due to the limited time frame and resources, I drew my case study data from trainee teachers’ interview data alone, which could be seen as a limitation. However, given the nature of my data and how they were collected, the participants’ perspectives were central to how I made sense of the specific learning cultures of their workplaces and their different roles, which subsequently influenced my analysis of the data. Moreover, I complemented my interview data with key documentation about the teacher training preparation programme. Collecting and analysing this material to provide an understanding of the context also subsequently confirmed my knowledge of the training of vocational teachers.

Data analysis

The process of data collection and data analysis was cyclical. Each stage of data analysis helped to inform the subsequent data collection, which focused on deepening understanding and examining in-depth experiences of the trainee teachers at their workplaces. The analysis of the data involved two stages. The first stage was carried out during the first round of interviews. I approached my interview data with reference to the three-stage process of description, analysis and interpretation to transform qualitative data (Wolcott 1994 ). The process of description involved drawing up individual case stories to obtain an in-depth understanding of each participant’s career decisions and learning in the workplace. I then subjected these stories to re-analysis in the light of data obtained from the second interview.

I also used Moustakas’ ( 1990 ) “heuristic analysis” to make sense of the data through immersion, then standing back and allowing the subconscious to work. Moustakas’ heuristic method provided a framework for guidance and clarification which helped to challenge my pre-assumptions from my own experiences. Sandy Sela-Smith ( 2002 ) acknowledges that this makes Moustakas’ method a valuable tool in the exploration of subjective human experience, especially the experiences of student teachers when they move from one context to another. My own personal experience as a student teacher and a staff member on the teacher training programme acted as a catalyst for inquiry. As Moustakas ( 1990 ) makes clear, the qualities of tacit knowing (Polanyi 1983 ) and intuition are crucial components of heuristic inquiry. Drawing on Egon Guba and Yvonna Lincoln’s ( 1989 ) version of the “hermeneutic circle”, analysis of the data involved moving between the parts and the whole. Neither of these could be understood without reference to the other, as “meanings c[an] only be understood in relation to a larger whole” (Hollway and Jefferson 2000 ).

Through immersion in the first and second interview transcripts, I wrote up case studies of individual student-teachers’ learning for each participant using a largely descriptive process incorporating significant sections of the original interview data to represent the individual’s own words. The main reason for writing up individual case studies for each participant was not just to produce a story for that individual, but also to understand how they learned to become a vocational teacher through engaging in different learning contexts across their career journey. In the second stage of analysis, I compared the twelve case studies in terms of issues, patterns, commonalities and differences, which is part of Moustakas’ ( 1990 ) heuristic research. The revealed patterns were examined, and themes began to emerge through a rigorous inductive and iterative process. The procedure also involved contextualising the data within a broader theoretical framework in the same research field. Here, the theory of learning cultures based on Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of cultural and other forms of “capital” (Bourdieu 1986 ) provided an overarching framework and a set of “thinking tools” to link the case studies with broader issues.

Revisiting two participants’ learning journeys

In this article, I focus on two individuals, Mary and Phillip, to explore their learning at their workplaces. Mary and Phillip were both training to become vocational teachers, but were, at the time of my study, at different stages of their learning journey, with different roles. These stages include their workplace learning as full-time teachers before enrolling in their teacher training programme (i.e. during their first few years of teaching) and their learning as in-service trainee teachers in their workplaces.

I have chosen Mary’s and Phillip’s stories for a specific reason. Research has shown that worker position, status, and the nature of work can influence individual learning and career development (Billett 2001 ; Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2004 ). This article aims to explore these differences and the individuals’ dispositions towards learning across the different learning cultures in which they participated. My findings show that the interrelationships between positions, identity and agency play a significant role in influencing workplace learning at different stages of becoming a vocational teacher. At the time of my study, Mary and Phillip were both in-service teachers in the early stages of their career, with different career trajectories. Although both had enrolled in the same teacher training programme, their approaches to learning differed. I argue that this difference is due to the interrelationship between individual positions and dispositions to learning and workplace learning cultures.

The following stories are constructed based on the interview data alone. These constructed stories are mine. One might argue that there are always different versions of personal stories that can be constructed (Stronach and MacLure 1997 ). For some researchers of a realist bent (Feuer et al. 2002 ), this might call into question the validity of my findings. My response to such critics is that, with qualitative data like mine, researchers do their best to tell a version of the truth as honestly as possible, and there is no doubt that some uncertainties will remain. Nevertheless, the credibility of the research is strengthened if other researchers working in a similar setting end up with similar stories. The credibility of the research then becomes a matter of coherence, as John Smith argues succinctly:

For interpretive inquiry, the basis of truth or trustworthiness is social agreement; what is judged true or trustworthy is what we can agree, conditioned by time and place, is true or trustworthy (Smith 1984 , p. 386).

Moreover, the findings from this study may also “ring true” in other settings. Readers can judge for themselves whether the analysis presented sounds convincing based on what they know of similar settings. In addition, I have established rigour in my research findings through a coherent methodology, i.e. by using case studies within an interpretive framework. Thus, the rationale for every stage of the methodology is made clear.

The interrelationship between individual positions, identity and agency in workplace learning

In order to contextualise the findings in this section, I will first provide case descriptions of Mary and Phillip to give some sense of “change over time” as a dimension of workplace learning as they change roles at their workplaces. Following this, I use the concepts of position , identity and agency that underpin the proposed “learning journey” to analyse and discuss these case descriptions.

Learning as a new teacher

Mary, a Malay woman, had been employed as a full-time tutor at nursing college. Prior to becoming a nurse tutor, she undertook training in the same nursing college before going overseas to further her studies. Upon graduation, she joined the staff of the college. Initially, she was appointed as a coordinator, a role which she felt she had been appointed to prematurely. Her colleagues, who were also her teachers at that time, had high expectations of her. Because she had a higher degree qualification, they appointed her as a coordinator straight away:

“Their high expectations have thrown me off the board … I wanted them to know that I have limited teaching experience … I didn’t think that I gave an impression that I knew everything, but they thought that being a postgraduate student, I should be knowledgeable. Some colleagues challenged me that way which in a way intimidated me. They would put up their wall …”

Mary had expected to be allocated a mentor who could guide her when she first joined the teaching staff, but she was not given one. She felt lost as she was provided neither with a curriculum nor a formal induction in how to deliver it. Despite this lack of support, she managed to develop her teaching skills through trial and error and chose to teach modules where she felt she could contribute. She also chose to take the initiative to learn from her colleagues:

“I made my initiative to come to some of the colleagues which I considered as a good teacher, to observe how they teach the subjects which I will be teaching. I sat in a few of their classes and I even co-teach with these teachers.” [emphasis added]

She also co-taught with another colleague whom she had the chance to observe before being given some lessons to teach herself. She remembered her first lesson, where she did not know how to begin or which teaching approach to use. However, she was able to draw on her past observations of her colleague, which helped her to continue with the teaching. In addition, she did have the support of a buddy system which consisted of junior tutors who had already been through the teacher training programme. As well as sharing resources, this buddy system allowed them to conduct “cross-teaching”, a new approach whereby all of them collaborated to deliver the curriculum across different levels, instead of just one level of any particular programme.

As a nurse tutor, Mary also had to teach in a clinical setting. She felt she lacked the clinical experience to be able to demonstrate practical knowledge of nursing, as she had not worked as a nurse:

“… my undergraduate degree has prepared me with a lot of practical experience but it is different when you are a nurse in the hospital. I am groomed strongly in theory, but theory is useless if you don’t know the practical side of it, which made me feel deficient.”

Mary therefore did not have a smooth transition into her first year of teaching. Instead, she had to be proactive in building social relationships with her colleagues and finding learning opportunities, since the college itself gave her limited support.

In contrast to Mary’s story, Phillip’s learning trajectory to becoming a vocational teacher went comparatively smoothly. Phillip, a middle-aged Chinese man, decided to go into teaching after working for several years as an engineer abroad. He developed an interest in teaching after mentoring some work-attachment (trainee) students at his engineering workplace. He was eager to join the teacher training programme to equip himself with the appropriate pedagogical skills. When he first joined his college, he saw himself as an engineer and a teacher:

“I see myself as an engineer and a teacher because I think it has to be together. For me you cannot be a good engineering lecturer unless you are also a good engineer in terms of your knowledge … keeping update with what is going in the industry, for example, and know what is happening in the industry is important …”

Due to his previous role as an engineer, Phillip would teach his students in the same way that he made presentations as an engineer to his clients. Unlike Mary, Phillip was allocated an unofficial mentor who helped him transition into his workplace. Phillip’s mentor was helpful and supported Phillip by sharing teaching resources with him. They would discuss different issues, and the mentor would challenge Phillip with difficult tutorial questions. Phillip was also given opportunities to be involved in developing the curriculum. He therefore had a chance to understand the content of each of the programmes.

Learning as a trainee teacher

During her enrolment in the teacher training programme, Mary found it useful to return to her workplace for her teaching placement every Monday to try out different teaching methods that she had learnt in the programme. Phillip was less keen to try out the methods he had learnt in the programme at his placements. Having taught in his college for the past three years, Phillip had already gained knowledge of the teaching approaches which were most useful to teaching his subject, and he was familiar with the type and level of his students. When introduced to new methods of teaching and learning, he therefore decided to continue what he had been doing before entering the programme:

“… I can see the point of using these methods, but I am not so sure whether I want to implement it all as much as [name of university lecturer] would like in my lectures … I will still use my own way of structuring my lesson and will do one for the university.”

Mary found it challenging to switch her role to that of trainee teacher at her workplace every Monday. She had to adjust to her role as a learner and learn to negotiate with her mentor, who was also the headmaster of her college, to observe her teaching. Her colleagues continued to see her as their full-time colleague rather than as someone who still needed time to acquire the full range of skills a teacher possesses. Mary therefore had to learn to be proactive in protecting her role as a learner when on her teacher training programme:

“Most of them view me as a professional colleague … They wanted to give me a lot of hours to teach ... I also need to be very assertive … or else I would end up 100 hours of teaching and top up with what I have to do here [university].” [emphasis added]

Like Mary, Phillip also continued to be seen by his colleagues as their full-time colleague. Unlike Mary, however, he also saw himself as a full-time teacher and continued to perform his role when given the usual administrative duties:

“… we have to supervise projects as well … and for this semester, I have to take on more teaching workload … I am also the timetable coordinator for the department ...”

Phillip had had the same mentor when he first entered teaching. However, he did not entirely follow his mentor’s advice:

“… he is helpful when he has the time. If I ask anything, he will help. He gives a lot of advice, maybe some of it I will use it. Although he has more experience than me, I still disagree with certain things he said … he has got his own points and views about certain things. For example, for assessments, he would do certain things certain ways, I would say ... there is another way of doing it … I find I don’t do everything he does, but I find his advice and guidance very helpful.”

“Learning cultures” and “dispositions”

Mary’s and Phillip’s stories illustrate how they learn at their workplaces with different roles. There is an extensive body of literature which shows how learning is situated. Lave and Wenger suggest that:

learning is not merely situated in practice – as if it were some independently reifiable process that just happened to be located somewhere; learning is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world (Lave and Wenger 1991 , p. 35).

Phil Hodkinson et al. ( 2007b ) prefer to understand the social practices through which people learn as “learning cultures”. Therefore, within any workplace, a learning culture exists. It follows that participation in different learning cultures will influence individuals’ lives differently (Biesta et al. 2011 ). What is equally important is the position of individuals in these workplace learning cultures, as these influence the way they perceive their work practices. Put another way, individuals have subjective perceptions called dispositions which are located within their objective positions. Dispositions are more than schemata of perceptions or beliefs. Rather, these perceptions derive from and are part of the whole person. Bourdieu uses the term “habitus” to capture all this, defined as a battery of dispositions accumulated through ongoing life experiences that are durable and transposable (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ). Individual positions influence learning in many ways. For example, social positions can be historical and geographical, or situated within particular learning cultures (see Hodkinson et al. 2008 ).

When Mary first joined her teaching job, she was in a better position than other newcomers like Phillip since she had herself once been a student of this college, i.e. her new workplace. She knew many of the lecturers, and was able to draw on her own student experiences to inform her teaching. In Bourdieu’s terms, she had both cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1986 ). Cultural capital is defined as the amount of knowledge relative to the learning culture. It is deemed valuable, since it usually determines whether a person will succeed (ibid.). Social capital is an individual’s network of relations with other people (ibid.).

Legitimate peripheral participation vs. being thrown in at the deep end

As a newcomer, Mary would normally be positioned at the periphery of the workplace community of practice and gradually learn the ropes before being given full responsibility for a task. Lave and Wenger ( 1991 ) refer to this as “legitimate peripheral participation”. Instead, she was thrown in at the deep end, like the teachers in Colin Lacey’s ( 1977 ) study. She was given limited support and no mentor, yet was expected to take on full responsibility. Her accrued cultural capital in terms of her subject knowledge and social capital from her student years did not help her to learn as a newcomer. They may even have created a barrier to her learning opportunities. Elsewhere (Goh and Zukas 2016 ) a co-author and myself have reported similar findings, which contradict Bourdieu, who states that having cultural capital makes one likely to succeed in the relevant field (Bourdieu 1986 ). We argue that cultural capital is not the only aspect that should be considered when trying to understand how individuals learn in a learning context (see also Goh 2014 ). Mary’s story clearly shows the opposite. In hindsight, it is worth noting that Lave and Wenger ( 1991 ) did not address the issue of newcomers having to take on full responsibility without being allowed to experience the process of legitimate peripheral participation. Mary’s story shows that newcomers are not always necessarily positioned at the periphery of a community of practice.

It is similarly worth noting that Hodkinson et al. ( 2007b ) did not explicitly discuss how individuals manage the transition from newcomer to full member in such a short timescale within a learning culture. The lack of time for this transition requires individuals to adapt quickly to the new role and the level of responsibility that comes with it. Mary’s account of her learning is similar to what Miriam Zukas and Sue Kilminster ( 2012 ) call the “critical intensive learning period”. This occurs when individuals are not treated as newcomers when transitioning to new areas of work and responsibilities, but are instead “thrown in at the deep end” and expected to be experts and act with full responsibility. Similarly, Hodkinson and Hodkinson’s research study ( 2003 , 2004 ) showed that when an experienced teacher changed to a new job, they were expected to be an expert from the outset. Unlike Mary, Phillip, who was positioned at the periphery and who lacked cultural and social capital in relation to his workplace, had a smooth transition into becoming a teacher with the support of his mentor.

Identity and changing roles

Due to Mary’s ambiguous position in relation to her workplace, she had a difficult transition period from learning as a new teacher to learning as a trainee teacher compared to Phillip. Within the literature, there is limited understanding of how the change of positions in relation to the workplace influences individuals’ learning. What emerges strongly from these two stories is that change over time through learning within the workplace is influenced by the change of roles from teacher to trainee teacher. Subsequently, the extent of this influence on individuals’ dispositions to learn depends on the tension between their “self-identity” (how they see themselves in relation to the situation) and how they exercise their agency when colleagues continue to see them as full-time teachers. Mary’s story reveals a marked tension between her “self-identity” and how she was viewed by her colleagues, which compelled her to exercise her agency to protect her learner status.

Identity can also be defined as a person’s disposition about themselves (Biesta et al. 2011 ). Defining it in this way allows us to think of identity as more than a cognitive concept, since most of the time we cannot articulate clearly who we are, and even if we are and do, much is left out. That is, our accumulated dispositions add up to more than how we think of ourselves. At the same time, how we see ourselves underpins many of our dispositions towards life.

The stories of Mary and Phillip illustrate the influence of early-career vocational teachers’ dual identities (Fejes and Köpsén 2014 ) on their learning journey. Phillip saw himself as an engineer as well as a teacher. He recognised the need to learn to teach whilst still keeping his vocational skills up to date with developments in the industry. Similarly, Mary stressed the importance of equipping herself with clinical skills, since these reflected upon her credibility as a nurse tutor. Mary saw herself as a nurse tutor much of the time, but she never explicitly talked about how her clinical nursing knowledge influenced her teaching. Mary talked on several occasions about teaching her students the importance of emotional care and the subtleties of caring for older patients. This illustrates the overlap between an individual’s identity and the roles they are called on to play. How individuals see themselves is linked to their roles in the workplace. The stories in this article show that it is important to understand both how newcomers view themselves and the expectations placed on them by other people in their role as new workers in the workplace, which tends to be overlooked in the literature.

Coping strategies

Mary and Phillip were both able to shape their responses to the situations they encountered in their workplaces in different ways. They responded differently based on the relationship between how they saw their own roles in their workplaces and how others saw them. Mary comes across as a very strong-willed person. She struggled to maintain her role due to the tensions between her identity and her position within the learning culture. As discussed earlier on, tensions arose when she saw herself as a new teacher, but her colleagues viewed her as an expert. Her colleagues had high expectations of her capability and therefore gave her minimal support in learning to teach. She was thus obliged to construct learning relationships (Goh 2013 ) with her “buddies” which allowed her to learn to teach by “cross-teaching” with them. Tensions also arose when Mary saw herself as a trainee teacher, but her colleagues viewed her as a full-time teacher. She had to be proactive in keeping her learner status in order to be able to learn in her workplace. These tensions were difficult to reconcile. They resulted in Mary having to exercise her agency in constructing or reshaping her work role and identity.

In Phillip’s story, there are several examples of tensions between his identity and his position when he returned to his workplace as a trainee teacher. Unlike Mary, Phillip saw himself as a teacher and was viewed as such by his colleagues, who gave him administrative tasks. He managed his tensions differently to Mary by being proactive in taking up these tasks. His actions and dispositions can be described as “strategic compliance” in satisfying the needs of his workplace. Phillip also exercised his agency when writing two sets of lesson plans: one to satisfy the university programme’s requirements and another reflecting the way he had been teaching prior to enrolling on the programme. Tensions arose when there was disagreement between Phillip and his mentor regarding teaching methods. In these instances Phillip was seen to be taking control of his learning.

As Mary and Phillip transitioned to a different level of work and responsibility involving a change of roles over time, they were required to practise some degree of agency in “negotiating their identity positions” (Eteläpelto et al. 2013 , 2014 ; Vähäsantanen and Eteläpelto 2009 , 2011 ; Goh 2013 ) in order to change work practices. This requirement creates differences in individuals’ dispositions to learning in their respective workplaces even among people with the same status of trainee teacher. Put simply, the difference in individuals’ learning results from the interrelationship between three concepts: position, identity and agency . Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische ( 1998 , p. 971) argue that agency is the “capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations”. Drawing on this idea, Gert Biesta and Michael Tedder see agency as “the ability to exert control over and give direction to one’s life” (Biesta and Tedder 2007 , p. 135). Biesta et al. ( 2011 ) argue that agency is the individual’s ability to change parts of their dispositions and/or their positions. The stories of Mary and Phillip clearly show that the variation in the exercise of agency depends on an individual’s identities, professional competence and relations to other professionals in the workplace (Vähäsantanen et al. 2009 ; Kersh 2015 ). In circumstances like those of Mary and Phillip where work roles and identity are not clearly defined for other workers, individuals need to exercise agency to establish their own professional identities (Eteläpelto et al. 2013 ). An individual’s agentic actions are akin to striving for distinction in order to survive and be successful (Bourdieu 1984 ).

The “learning journey”: the interrelationship between individuals and workplace learning cultures

The change-over-time dimension of workplace learning is seen when individuals change workplaces or change their roles within the same workplace over a period of time, which usually results in a change of work practices. Mary’s and Phillip’s stories illustrate that the interrelationship between individual positions, agency and identity is paramount to understanding an individual’s lifelong workplace learning. When Mary and Phillip changed roles within their workplaces, their positions changed in relation to their workplaces’ learning cultures. To cope with this, they were then required to exercise their agency which was largely tied to their identities. These findings concur with the argument of Anneli Eteläpelto et al. ( 2013 ) that in order to construct meaningful life courses we should focus on how individuals negotiate agency in work and life. To develop a robust conceptualisation of lifelong workplace learning, we need to explore the learning cultures of the different workplaces in which individuals participate. Learning can only be understood through the interrelationship of the learning cultures of workplaces and individuals.

At all levels, there is a complex interaction between individual dispositions and identity on the one hand, and individual positions in a range of workplaces on the other, each with its own learning culture. When the roles of Mary and Phillip changed from teacher to trainee teacher, the learning cultures within their workplaces also shifted. Their stories illustrate the importance of individual positions and dispositions in relation to practices within the workplace (Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2004 ; Goh 2021 ). This study also reconfirms Hodkinson’s concepts of “learning careers” and “learning lives”, since it shows that individuals’ dispositions to learning can develop and change over time through interaction with different learning cultures across the lifespan. Simultaneously, learning cultures within the workplace can change over time, which often results in either continuity or changes in practices.

Mary’s and Phillip’s actions and dispositions to learning exist in relation to many other factors which influence the learning cultures of their workplaces. Their learning was also dependent on and shaped by workplace affordances , which are constituted by workplace hierarchies, contestation and personal relations (Billett 2001 ). On the other hand, the learning opportunities that an individual can see in their workplace are limited by the position they occupy and the horizons that are visible from that position. Hodkinson et al. prefer to describe this as an individual’s “horizon of learning”. That is,

… in any situation there are opportunities to learn. What those opportunities are, and the ways in which the process of learning takes place, depends on the nature of the learning culture and of the position, habitus and capitals of the individuals, in interaction with each other in their horizons for learning, as part of a field of relationships (Hodkinson et al. 2008 , p. 41).

This process, a kind of “learning to become”, also depends on the individual’s receptiveness and the extent to which s/he is able to recognise the learning support available from others, in order to maintain individual engagement with the activities for continuing development. When tensions surfaced, Mary was able to leverage her buddy system to learn to teach. Anne Edwards ( 2015 ) calls this “relational agency”, referring to individuals’ capacity to be receptive and engage with others as resources.

Learning as becoming

Mary’s and Phillip’s learning to “become” involved a change in roles within the same workplace. They needed to (re)negotiate their identities in different circumstances, which depended partly on how their colleagues saw them and partly on how they themselves saw their changing roles. Lesley Scanlon ( 2011 ) argues that the process of “becoming” involves individuals rehearsing their “possible or provisional selves” (Ibarra 1999 ). In line with other scholars (Billett 2011 ; Harteis and Goller 2014 ; Vähäsantanen et al. 2017 ), the stories of Mary and Phillip highlight that individual agency is crucial in the formation of individuals’ learning and the development of professional identities where learning and practice are relational (Billett 2010 ).

Given the complexity of the interrelationship between individuals and their context, individuals’ lifelong workplace learning can be viewed as a journey, which considers individuals’ learning as becoming through participating in different learning cultures longitudinally throughout the entire length of their life. Mary and Phillip continued to learn throughout their working life, and thus continued to “become”. This process of “learning to become” can be one of change or of continuity, depending on the individual’s changing roles and positions. Individuals are always “becoming” through continuous learning experiences which become a part of them (Jarvis 2007 ), and which either reinforce or change their dispositions. This study shows that individuals learn to become through exercising their agency in different ways, either changing or reinforcing their practices in the workplace. This in turn illustrates that individuals can only learn to become through participating in the practices within their learning cultures.

The concept of a “learning journey” is useful in researching individuals’ change over time as a dimension of workplace learning, which involves either a change of workplaces or a change of role within the workplace. A learning journey highlights the significance of the interrelationship between individual dispositions and ever-changing learning contexts (in this case, Mary’s and Phillip’s different workplaces). The learning journey considers the complex interrelationships between individual agency, positions and identity, which vary between individuals, at different times and in different situations. This highlights the need for lifelong learning policies to consider individual responsibility for learning and workplace affordances (Billett 2001 ), while also taking account of the necessity of informal learning (Marsick and Watkins 1990 ).

The concept of a “learning journey” addresses the limitations of existing workplace learning theories which overlook the perspectives of either the individual learner or the workplaces. It does this by signifying the importance of individual learners and their habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992 ) where learning is embodied, rather than simplistically trying to understand learning by looking only at the work practices within a work organisation. The concept of a “learning journey” is timely since it helps us to reconsider change over time as a dimension of workplace learning, in ways which look beyond the traditional linear career progression in this unpredictable postmodern era. It brings a fresh perspective on how individual lifelong workplace learning can be supported through unprecedented and disruptive events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

is a Senior Assistant Professor at the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. She completed her PhD at the Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Leeds, UK, and was previously appointed as an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Her background as an adult educator has entailed engagement with professionals in education, healthcare and other professional sectors. Her research interests include workplace learning, adult education, teacher education, professional learning and lifelong learning.

1 The method I used to recruit participants was based on practical and pragmatic guidelines such as being accessible; willing to be interviewed during the time allocated to them and representing different vocational teaching areas.

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individual learning journey

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Memoranda of a Journey to Moscow in the Year 1856

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Memoranda of a Journey to Moscow in the Year 1856 Hardcover – September 1, 2015

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  • Print length 372 pages
  • Language English
  • Publisher Palala Press
  • Publication date September 1, 2015
  • Dimensions 6.14 x 0.88 x 9.21 inches
  • ISBN-10 1340972743
  • ISBN-13 978-1340972745
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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Palala Press (September 1, 2015)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 372 pages
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  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.53 pounds
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Moscow Tour Report- Part 2: The Untold Story of the Cargo’s Journey

individual learning journey

Often, when we see a performance by an ensemble from abroad, we think of how far the musicians have traveled to be there, and what that must be like. But sometimes we don’t realize just how big of an undertaking it is to transport an entire orchestra -and their instruments- to another continent. Below, Violinist Alexandra Adkins describes the untold story of the cargo’s journey.

CLICK HERE to stream the concert LIVE from Moscow at 10:00 AM Friday and Saturday mornings!

Musicians in Moscow

Our orchestra on tour is accompanied by lots of cargo; instrument shipping trunks, wardrobe trunks, special chairs and so on. The musicians were fortunate to head to Moscow Tuesday on a 12 hour nonstop flight, but our cargo had a more extensive journey. According to stage manager Donald Ray Jackson, it is a four day process that began immediately following the Ima Hogg performance on June 2nd. The symphony truck was loaded up that night and headed for IAH, where Sunday morning he and assistant stage manager Kelly Morgan began building seven container pallets from the various instrument and wardrobe trunks. It is a complicated puzzle to make the pallets the size that will fit in the cargo hold of a passenger plane. Every piece is X- rayed before loading. Donald Ray and Kelly travel with our shipment every step of the way. Our cargo arrived Monday afternoon in London, where it was offloaded and transferred to a climate controlled warehouse until the Moscow flight Tuesday morning. Due to a size issue with one of our containers, some of our cargo was delayed, thus everything did not arrive in Moscow until 3:00 AM Wednesday morning. Clearing Russian customs, disassembling the pallets and loading up trucks for transport to Moscow’s Hall of Columns took the next 18 hours, and finally at 11:30 PM Wednesday night our four very sleep deprived Houston stage crew members began the two hour load in to the hall– assisted by Russian crew– so that our instruments would be available for individual practice on Thursday morning. Donald Ray and Kelly are now catching up on their ZZZ’s in the subway, on the bus, and anywhere else they can find a quiet corner!

individual learning journey

Wheel of Fortune: Orff’s Carmina Burana

individual learning journey

A Journey Through Love, Fate, and Triumph: Unraveling Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, Tragic

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IMAGES

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VIDEO

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COMMENTS

  1. The learning S curve and individual development

    The S-curve framework is not a new concept. The management thinker Charles Handy first applied it, also known as life cycle thinking or the "sigmoid curve," to organizational and individual development in the mid-1990s. 1 Applying this thinking to the L&D context, however, is a new, innovative, and powerful way to describe cycles of ...

  2. How to Create a Personal Learning Plan: 5 Steps

    A personal learning plan—also called a personal learning syllabus—is a self-directed planning tool to help an individual achieve specific learning objectives. ... Download our business essentials flowchart to find the right course to begin your learning journey. This post was updated on August 20, 2021. It was originally published on May 17 ...

  3. How To Create a Learning Journey

    A learning journey is a series of formal and informal training programs that ingrain new knowledge, build existing skills and boost professional development. Learning journeys include different learning experiences that occur over time. ... Informal learning is valuable to both the individual and the organization because it improves ...

  4. Seven key practices for lifelong learners

    7. Stay vital. The ability to stay vital can contribute significantly to a person's development. This goal demands that individuals make health and well-being a priority—paying attention to exercise, nutrition, sleep, and relaxation (for example, mindfulness and yoga) and developing good, sustainable habits.

  5. How to Create Effective Learning Journeys that Drive Employee ...

    A learning journey is a comprehensive, continuous process of acquiring knowledge and skills, designed to facilitate long-term behavior change and professional development. ... Learning Journeys: Tailored to individual learning styles and needs. Engagement and Interaction: Traditional Training: Can be more passive in nature. Learning Journeys ...

  6. Designing the Learner's Journey Online Class

    Expert instructional designer Michael Allen explores how you can use every learner's time productively. Michael shows you how to focus your time and energy on what matters most, by focusing on ...

  7. How To Create Learning Journeys

    Throughout the learning journey, employees need a safe space to participate, digest, apply, and experiment with the new knowledge they're gaining through the learning journey. The experimentation and feedback loop are key to achieving behavior change. Ongoing connects. Design learning journeys that include more than formal training events.

  8. How to Create Learning Journeys that Deliver Engaging Remote Trainings

    True learning and implied behavior change requires a learning journey to boost professional development and achieve improved performance. In this article, I look at the link between learning journeys and how it can improve employee performance. ... They are highly relevant to the individual, assisting him/her with his/her career aspirations.

  9. How to Design an Effective Learning Journey

    The traditional approach to learning journeys is no longer effective. Learning journeys have usually been designed to solve a leadership challenge over the course of a predefined time—six or 12 months, for example. But at DDI, we know that learning journeys must be comprehensive and continuous throughout a career and adapt to ever-changing leadership challenges.

  10. Full article: Learning journeys: exploring approaches to learner

    Learners can undertake the digital journey as a complete learning experience as many times as desired, or select individual components of the journey as appropriate for their individual learning. The journey thus imposes the personal on the technical, providing 24/7 access to structured learning literacy support.

  11. An individual learning journey: learning as becoming a vocational

    This paper argues that learning varies significantly from individual to individual, time to time, context to context and also in different stages of individuals' lives. This transition could be viewed as an individual learning journey, through understanding the interrelationship between individuals and the contexts, across the individuals ...

  12. How to Create a Learning Journey for Leaders

    The key is that L&D professionals create a structure that makes learning happen better. For example, giving leaders time to process what they're learning on their own, and then coming back together in peer learning groups to discuss what they learned. This is just one way to ensure self-directed learning sticks. 3.

  13. 10 Compelling Benefits of Personalized Learning for Individuals

    Personalized learning allows for targeted and timely feedback . Educators can provide specific feedback tailored to individual needs, addressing areas for improvement and recognizing strengths. This personalized feedback promotes self-reflection, a growth mindset, and ongoing skill development. 9. Boosted Confidence.

  14. Learning journey: Conceptualising "change over time" as ...

    Understanding how individuals learn at work throughout their lives is significant for discussions of lifelong learning in the current era where changes can be unpredictable and frequent, as illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite a corpus of literature on the subject of "learning", there is little research or theoretical understanding of "change over time" as a dimension of ...

  15. Learning Journeys: The Future of Learning and Development

    The first step in implementing learning journeys is to conduct a thorough analysis of the organization's learning and development needs. This involves identifying the desired skills and competencies, understanding the target audience, and mapping out the learning journey based on individual career paths.

  16. The Importance of a Learning Journey

    Benefits of the learning journey. It has the following advantages: It helps the learners to navigate appropriately. It helps them to gain knowledge independently. A well-aligned learning journey brings additional structure to a learning system. It provides a structured environment that helps to maintain discipline in the learning process.

  17. Individual learning journeys

    Individual learning journeys. We're here to support your students to develop their talents through engaging, skills-based qualifications - whatever their learning style. Discover how all learners have the chance to explore their talents with our business qualifications.

  18. Learning Journeys for Team and Organizational Transformation

    A learning journey is a cohort-based, curated series of workshops and training combined with practicum projects and coaching delivered by external, internal, or a combination of facilitators and coaches. ... When several people from the same team go through a learning journey together, their individual transformation in applying new ways of ...

  19. PDF President Ronald Reagan s Address to the Students of Moscow State

    government, has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. America is a nation made up of hundreds of nationalities. Our ties to you are more than ones of good feeling; they're ties of kinship.

  20. Digital History ID 1234

    Ronald Reagan, Speech at Moscow State University. Digital History ID 1234. Author: Ronald W. Reagan. Date:1988. Annotation: During a visit to the Soviet Union in 1988, President Ronald Reagan, a lifelong anti-communist, met with students at Moscow State University and delivered a stirring plea for democracy and individual rights.

  21. Learning journey: Conceptualising "change over time" as a dimension of

    The "learning journey": the interrelationship between individuals and workplace learning cultures. The change-over-time dimension of workplace learning is seen when individuals change workplaces or change their roles within the same workplace over a period of time, which usually results in a change of work practices.

  22. Memoranda of a Journey to Moscow in the Year 1856 Hardcover

    Memoranda of a Journey to Moscow in the Year 1856 [Thomson, Fanny Mary] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Memoranda of a Journey to Moscow in the Year 1856

  23. Moscow Tour Report- Part 2: The Untold Story of the Cargo's Journey

    Moscow Tour Report- Part 2: The Untold Story of the Cargo's Journey