Editorial

Citation

Kekle, T. and Cervai, S. (2008), "Editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 20 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.2008.08620daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Workplace Learning, Volume 20, Issue 4.

As befits the Journal of Workplace Learning, we as the editors are learning something new every day. It seems that publishing is rapidly becoming a tougher business, with lots of universities deciding to encourage publishing only in citation-indexed journals. In doing this, they pay no attention to the fact that publication opportunities are in quite short supply. We can just imagine the pressure some young writers face in attempting to be one of the 30-something researchers worldwide, per year, to get their research published in an indexed journal. We have similar problems with the number of articles that can be accepted per year. In 2008 with double the number from the Researching Work and Learning conference in South Africa in December already booked in, we have precisely nine slots for articles free. Thus we must turn down some quite good papers, and the tenth paper to be accepted by us after today will already be carried forward to Vol. 21. Time flies! Nevertheless, we want to keep on expanding our horizons. Sara is going to visit the International Conference of Psychology in Berlin (June) and the AlpeAdria Psychology conference in Ljubljana (October), and Tauno is attending a publication workshop in Gothenburg with vocational researchers later in the year. Both of these are new cooperation opportunities for JWL. We think editors of journals are nowadays obliged to be more accessible to authors, and we try to do our best to be visible and easy to approach in order to help them publish good papers.

Speaking of which, we indeed feel we too are learning; the articles in this issue include a couple that we feel are the best we have received during our time as editors. These articles have all gone through a rigorous review and revision process and are now very good. We start this issue with an article by Shelley A. Berg and Seung Youn exploring “Factors that influence informal learning in the workplace” and continue with Jo Rhodes, Peter Lok and Richard Yu-Yuan Hung on “An integrative model of organizational learning and social capital on effective knowledge transfer and perceived organizational performance”. Both of these articles are in our minds already now on the shortlist for the best papers of the 20th volume, and we recommend reading them as models of what level of research design and article preparation we would like to publish. The third article in this issue describes competencies acquisition through self-directed learning among managers (by Junaidah Hashim) and finally there is another insightful article “‘Grey’ areas and ‘organized chaos’ in emergency response” from Canada, by Nancy Taber, Donovan Plumb, and Shawn Jolemore. The issue is concluded by a paper from Richard Dealtry titled “Global corporate priorities and demand-led learning strategies”. This article explores how to optimise connections between the strategic needs of an organisation as directed by management and its learning management structures and strategies.

We are happy to feel that we are learning, and we hope you, dear reader, can see it too in the quality of the issue you have in your hands and meet us at some of the events we are going to attend in 2008!

Tauno Kekäle, Sara Cervai