The near future of workplace adult education

Paolo FederighiProf.

University of Florence

Goals

• Sharing some constructions to inspire and direct my action-research in the field of workplace learning (sometimes a forgotten part of the territory of the city)

• The underlying question is how we can improve the education of those who work through public policies and private (local, regional, national, transnational level)

Key points

Impact of 3 main processes affecting Workplace Learning:1. Company Financialisation 2. Global value chain3. Industry 4.0

Focus on Workplace learning potential

1. Company Financialisation

• Financialisation describes an economic system or process that attempts to reduce all value that is exchanged (whether tangible or intangible, future or present promises, etc.) into a financial instrument

The effect

The company is interested less and less to produce goods and, increasingly, to buy and sell capital, including its own brand.Buy and sell capital becomes the focus of the company. The company must make the money work. The workers have just a complementary role

Consequences for WP learning

• Adult learning becomes a business partner and must ensure an immediate return

• Attract people with high potential or already mature become the dream of the company

2. The global value chain

The global value chain:from trade in goods to trade in tasks

Way of organizing production in which the phases of the process and related tasks are distributed worldwide because of the ability of different cities to ensure the best conditions for its establishment.

The global distribution of tasks between the organizations and people of different cities/districts depends on their ability to carry them out with greater expertise and efficiency compared to other

Impact on WPL

• Competencies are an asset related to the company temporarily, in fact competences are permanently related to those engaged in the world labor market (brain drain and/or brain mobility). In order to exist, Company must produce and attract Talents

Global Talent Index:

attraction

Impact on WPL

• Competencies are an asset related to the company temporarily, in fact competences are permanently related to those engaged in the world market (brain drain and/or brain mobility)

• The learning cities move the competition also in the field of learning, such as modern medieval towns whose territories aim to become a hub of expertise, to attract and not to run away brains and companies

• New fields of learning: inter-cultural competences become crucial

• World market of adult education is fostered

Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 and Smart Factories

• Everything becomes smart: Bringing intelligence into all objects of industrial production as well as in life and work contexts

• The "Smart Factories" are intelligent production systems with a new ability to distribute tasks among several settlements and work in a network to create intelligent products of ultra-high quality, high precision, in limited quantities. The "Smart Factories" adopt new systems "Smart Production", with a strong focus on human-machine interaction.

Impact on WPL

• There is a need for new kind of persons. The creation of innovation and its use relies on people's intelligence, equipped with the finest quality than required by previous industrial eras.

• They must be capable, for example, to collect and interpret the large amount of information produced by intelligent monitoring of new production tools and, therefore, must be able to assume in real-time autonomous decision-making

Capabilities required/developed at work

If people at work is facing this kind of challenges, what’s the difference among company and

classroom?

That’s why we look at Workplace as cognitive system

Changing the relation education / production

• economic growth is the result of technological progress produced by the same economic activity and not only from external transfer: "technological advance come from things people do” (Romer, 1994:12) e “arises (…) because intentional actions taken by people” (Romer,1990:71).

Organisation as cognitive system

• Knowledge in business organisations: what to produce, how to produce, who deliver their goods and how to distribute (Vicari,2008: 55).

• This is possible because the organizations are "a cognitive system capable to transform knowledge into value through its daily action"

Comment

The growth is viewed as an endogenous process produced by the agents of production, based on people and innovation capacityIt is a process that generates learning and therefore knowledgewhich is accumulated in the cultural containers that are no more than the result of previous learning processes (basis for the further growth)

But the workplace learning potential is related also to the specific employee job position

Knowledge containers and their richness represents the first component of the workplace learning potential

Conclusions: But the richness of WPL is not equal.It depends from the interactions between time,

mode of cognition and type of processes

The Embedded learning solution

Transforming the actors of the production process in learning agents:• Managers• Co-workers• Providers

Transforming and producing new knowledge about:• products, • processes, • organisation, • market solutions

Back-up