Editorial

Citation

Cervai, S. and Kekäle, T. (2015), "Editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 27 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JWL-02-2015-0014

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Workplace Learning, Volume 27, Issue 3

In this issue of Journal of Workplace Learning, we have collated some articles that illuminate the problems of learning in high-technology organisations. Often, these new emerging technologies require non-standard forms of workplace learning because the experiences and contexts are new. People working in high-tech environments or modern R&D settings as technical consultants often must learn without previous examples, and must often re-learn and unlearn very quickly. Their working life is not so much organised as a career in a traditional way but is rather a long sequence of projects.

Jonas Söderlund and Elisabeth Borg, the authors of the first article in this issue, have studied liminality competence; that is, competence and learning in different threshold situations between organisations or within temporary organizations. Their article tells the story of such fast-track workplace learning through the voices of two engineers who jump from one development project to another. In the words of one of them, liminality could mean “work as knowledge transfer”, while the previous kind of work had been “assignment handling”. A lot of the competence that people in such positions need to learn has to do with “role sliding”, agility in taking continuously changing roles in organizational borderline areas. “Triggering events, such as entering a new type of project, seem to be necessary to produce a change in one’s conception of work, which, in turn, drives the individual to apply a different set of attributes when performing the work” says Söderlund and Borg.

Typical for modern-day, international projects is also its multilocality. The second article by Brigitte Harris, Kwan Cheng and Charlotte Gorley studies the use of time- and distance-bridging technologies in mentoring. Despite a context of extreme organizational churn, somewhat similar to Söderlund and Borg’s cases, this e-mentoring programme delivered cost-effective and engaging learning to a large number of employees. One further feature of modern open innovation paradigm is the transfer of knowledge between organizations. The research reported by Melvin Prince connects this to work-based learning in higher education organizations, one of our own current research areas. One of his main findings is that a supportive work-to-MBA-studies transfer climate will lead to more active learning of course content that has greater relevance for achieving career and workplace goals.

The focus of the article by Morten Kronstad and Martin Eide is the non-traditional workplace learning of journalists working in an online newspaper and their experiences, centering on framework conditions and learning environments. Online journalism is another type of high-tech and low-context work, in being both multimedial, interactive and hypertextual. As with the other high-tech workers whose learning experiences are discussed in this issue, learning for these journalists is reactive and non-traditional because new, previously unknown, situations arise all the time. Often, they also have to reframe their earlier ways of thinking and their beliefs. By channelling the knowledge acquired through non-formal learning into reflective activities, Kronstad and Eide note of the base of their interviews of the journalists, some of this new knowledge can be captured and recorded.

The fifth article concerns relatively stable organizational learning situations but in a very high-tech and high-risk area: air traffic control. Laura Pylväs and Petri Nokelainen have interviewed about 10 per cent of Finland’s air traffic controllers (ATCOs), and find that cognitive skills, self-reflection, volition and goal-orientation are considered to be ATCOs’ most important vocational characteristics, in addition to interpersonal, intrapersonal and spatial skills. The really good learners among these had strengths that were related to self-regulation.

Practically anywhere in the world, the workplace learning environments are changing more and more towards the settings presented in these articles. We hope that this selection of research reports can inspire you, dear Reader, to research your own environment to find implications of these articles – and we look forward to publish your related research.

Sara Cervai and Tauno Kekäle- Editors