Editorial

Citation

Cervai, S. and Kekale, T. (2013), "Editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 25 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.2013.08625baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Workplace Learning, Volume 25, Issue 2

One of the best ways to find out what is going on in scholarly research is still to go to a conference. We at JWL attempt to visit at least one conference every year, and this month (November 2012) we have attended the “Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship” annual conference in Dublin, Ireland (www.isbe.org.uk/ISBE-Annual-Conference). As the name of the organizer implies, the discussion had an emphasis on what happens in different stages of company lifecycle in the small business sector, but, in all of the six parallel Full-Paper sessions there was also a very well-attended session of Entrepreneurial Learning that was our main area of interest at the ISBE 2012. Learning patterns and methods in the typically one-person workplace of an entrepreneur have received a multitude of interesting research approaches from researchers, and as the assembly founded a Special Interest Group on Entrepreneurial Learning in Organizations, we offered this new SIG an idea of also selecting some of the papers for a future special issue of JWL, to extend our coverage to this recent topic.

For the current issue we have attempted to select papers on the loose topic of Professional Development and informal learning. We start with a detailed view to a highly specialized profession, “newly certified flight instructors (working) in an environment that is often unpredictable, unstable, and relegated to a confined space”, in an article by Andrea Ellinger. The complexity of their workplace learning is well illustrated in the article, as is the need to develop support systems and a collaborative learning culture among the peers.

In the following three articles, a variety of angles of research to professional development is reported: the opportunities for professional development in promoting work-family enrichment, by Monica Molino; the professional development among rural police officers (“spatial, emergent, embodied and deeply enmeshed in specificities, developed through interactions between human and non-human actors”) by Bonnie Slade, and, closing this second issue for our 2th Anniversary Volume, peer coaching as an institutionalized tool for professional development among Nigerian college teachers, in an article by Semiyu Aderibigbe.

We again hope we have managed to inspire you, dear reader, to enroll into research to workplace learning with the selection of evidence we have made for this issue. Keep the research reports, or your critique to our published research, coming in.

Yours

Sara Cervai, Tauno KekäleEditors