Editorial

Citation

Cervai, S. and Kekale, T. (2013), "Editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 25 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.2013.08625aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Workplace Learning, Volume 25, Issue 1

This is the first issue of the twenty-fifth volume of the Journal of Workplace Learning (JWL); a quarter of a century, so it would be time to have some kind of special party to celebrate the journal that John Peters founded a looooong time ago and that we have the honor to edit for about five years. Perhaps we will have an opportunity to have some kind of party for the quarter of a century of JWL, maybe at the 8th Researching Work and Learning, one of our major cooperation events, at Stirling Management Centre, University of Stirling, UK, 19-22 June 2013. We hereby wish everybody welcome there.

Due to the fact that we have a steady influx of articles from important research groups around the world, we can organize our issues to thematic wholes. This is an issue where we put an emphasis on one of the key items that defines the level of workplace learning: the supervisor. So, we start off with a paper by Sue Lancaster et al., discussing the supervisor behaviours that employees found to be helpful and unhelpful in facilitating training transfer. The findings suggest that whatever supervisors did prior to, during and after course attendance were critical to training transfer. Supportive behaviours prior to the course included motivating, encouraging and setting expectations.

The next article, by Leonard Pederson et al., uses the Delphi process to identify the tasks and responsibilities of a first line supervisor in a manufacturing job-shop environment, as well as the training options to develop supervisors’ ability to perform these tasks. Then, in our third article, Russell Warhurst analyses managers’ beliefs about learning and their reports of enabling workplace learning for both individuals and teams. The managers’ rationales for prioritizing development are discussed, the learning methods used are detailed and the types of outcomes which were targeted are evaluated in the article. Warhurst finds that “learning interventions were widely reported in a context of cuts and change, that questions the prevailing orthodoxy that development is sacrificed in times of cutbacks.”

Our own experience agrees with all of this; the role of the supervisors is crucial for learning at the workplace. But, as Pederson et al. and Warhurst state, supervisors and managers also need to learn, in order for the workplace to develop for the workers. This is a circle, either good or vicious; it is very difficult to create a learning organization where learning passes one of the key stakeholder groups, workers or supervisors. This is something for the top managers of learning organizations to keep at the forefront of their minds.

Finally in this first issue of 2013, our long-time contributors Karin Truijen et al. write about what it is that makes teacher teams effective in a vocational education context. Their results indicate that, according to managers interviewed for the study, team effectiveness within vocational education includes different aspects that refer to the results of team activities; next to team performance, aspects such as viability and team innovation may also be considered as valid indicators for team effectiveness. Also, the role of the manager was, once again, found to be crucial.

We wish that you once again get inspired by the research we are publishing, either at your workplace or for your research project. Keep the research reports, or your critique to our published research, coming in.

Sara Cervai, Tauno Kekale