Post Admission Learning - stakeholders standing back

Workforce Upskill

Recently in Australia it has been proposed that we will need to move towards an 80% TAFE or University credentialled workforce by 2050. But university qualifications are often not the end game. Many professions, and vocations, require new entrants to also satisfy admission rules (the admission step) in addition to obtaining a formal university or vocational qualification. This admission step usually operates within articulated, or formal competency or capability frameworks.

Credentialing is an important ingredient in maintaining standards of entry and progression for members of a profession. This is performed with industry advisory boards and professional associations' input often under legislative and regulatory regimes. Many organisations need their people to also be licenced professionals so as to practice as for example, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers financial advisors and nurses. In the software field software engineers build their skill profile by completing specific software application courses and exams. Many trades people including plumbers and electricians must acquire and maintain their licence.

Notably the vocational education field has a firmer educative grasp on the reality of competent work performance than the university led professional fields where there is often an objection to the concept of competency. Yet a skillful application of educational theory and practice can create sophisticated models of performance and assessment competency at any adult learning level, including post-admission learning in practice (at work).

However learning at work post admission exists in educational limbo, caught between academia, the workplace and professional practice. With none of the stakeholders stepping up to own the work of articulating, defining and mapping this workplace (or situated) learning.

Practitioner Led Knowledge Post-Admission

Academic led course content varies considerably in the approach to propositional and practical knowledge. Because of this, particularly in some professions, there has been a lack of attention by these stakeholders, including University Faculties, to practitioners' lived experiences of learning at work post admission.

This is unfortunate because there are significant benefits in collating and curating this practical knowledge into an educative and capability framework.

Lived Working Experience Post Admission

It is time for the voice and lived experience of the practitioner at work to become a central not peripheral focus in Business and Organisational Development.

The transition from university qualification to professional accreditation is clunky because in most professions there is no Professional Development educative framework post admission. Law is one such profession. I considered this issue in detail in my PhD, when I examined how best to support lawyers learning to manage and lead at work. One of the reasons I believe there was little interest in my findings was because of this artificial, perhaps even territorial, separation between academic learning at university, CLE providers and (professional) development at work.

This issue is demonstrated in the term, Learning and Development, which describes the skills development function of human resource practitioners who specialise in providing learning and development opportunities for organisational workers. Some organisations, and I note the Australian Public Service from 2021, have even chosen to use the term Academy for their internal L & D function. This term was also used by the Financial Services Institution for which I produced the Operations Management Continuous Improvement (OMCI)Enterprise Curriculum.

Unfortunately in most cases there is, in fact, a complete absence of workplace learning expertise, and foundational theoretical knowledge, in these formal structures and arrangements. And this matters. Why?

Because what practitioners do, in the absence of workplace and professional learning expertise, is to embark upon self-initiated work changes (Job Crafting) which relate directly to work tasks, often core work tasks. They do this without recognition and without a built in continuous improvement loop from this self-directed learning at work to formal work and learning structures and processes within the workplace.

Workplace learning experts maintain that work is learning and learning is work, they cannot always be separated into discrete domains of learning. As is the preferred approach in Learning and Development Enterprise (and Public Service) domains. Workplace learning by professionals is a lot messier than this.

Fundamentally Job Crafting is about workplace, professional learning and continuous learning. Omitting this connection, to Capability Maturity, makes it difficult, almost impossible to adequately support the person who is the job crafter at work.

Why does this matter?

Because, firstly there is no method to embed any important initiatives by the job crafter into the fabric of the capability of the organisation which could lead, for example, to productivity improvements for the enterprise, and secondly the Job Crafter is often isolated and identified as a trouble maker rather than celebrated as an important change agent and contributor.

There is insufficient encouragement, even pressure, on the organisation to step up and interrogate, and if appropriate, embrace these work initiatives. If this occurred the

opportunities to achieve mutual benefit would become evident.

Practitioner Led Learning at Work

The expertise and learning at work experiences of individual legal and medical practitioners post admission is considered to be an afterthought. And it is by implication considered to be too difficult to harness so as to create "academic" or "propositional" knowledge.

Master practitioner level accreditation is usually led by the Professional Associations such as in law, nursing and medicine. Without adequate links back to the University or to the workplace. This creates two dilemmas. Firstly the professional accreditation is often not mapped back into formal academic AQF levels and secondly the individual practitioner is caught between the demands of their workplace and the demands of the profession without either being accountable for their actual lived working experience. And without due regard to the operational setting and workplace culture.

There are however, valuable initiatives within the Health Industry, particularly in the interprofessional arena, which are leading the way in heralding change. These initiatives leave the legal profession way behind.

The person, who has not yet joined the profession or trade faces in some cases, significant hurdles to gain accreditation and acceptance within their chosen work type. The conventional truth is that this is about maintaining standards of performance, skills and ethics. However new entrant's experiences in striving to join a profession can be unheard or silenced because they speak uncomfortable truths.

A stark example of this is the student nurse or teacher who, under the current academic model is required to perform, (albeit it at less experienced level), unpaid work in a formal workplace. Under the supervision of an experienced practitioner. Or the resident doctor finding themselves performing hours of unpaid overtime.

If there was a professional learning (capability) model for resident doctors it would be possible to define the work of a resident doctor on an evidentiary basis, (based on the lived experience of doctors working in that hospital setting with that degree of supervision). This would alleviate the effect of subjective decisions about the work output of a doctor on a particular shift. And put pressure back on the employing organisation to create an effective feedback loop to correct bottlenecks and to improve its capability maturity.

This is where professional learning and workplace learning expertise can assist both individuals and the workplace to achieve better performance.

Leaderworker: Practitioner Led Role Sculpting

It is possible to map such a capability model (skills, knowledge, behaviour, access to resources, coaching and other professional support) into academic education levels and Quality Management Maturity models. I did this with the Operations Management Continuous Improvement (OMCI) enterprise curriculum I built for a large financial institution.

Here Role definition work becomes crucial. The core roles to be performed, to achieve the organisation's strategic goals, are clearly articulated and, where appropriate, defined and mapped into core work processes.

This becomes Role Sculpting if the organisation is mature enough to be informed by its Leadeworkers and engage with them to face into its workplace cultural and operational challenges. This becomes a change management piece.

The master practitioners (master professionals) within an organisation have the practical knowledge and wisdom to lead the creation of capability models (guided by workplace and professional learning experts). These people do leaderwork. They broker and navigate between the organisation (workplace culture) and their own professional culture, and local workplace, with the primary objective of achieving better practice.

What an untapped resource. For a respectful organisation.

The Equine (EQ) Link

Equine Experiential Education programs can significantly assist people to draw on their unique strengths and attributes. Equine assisted team building exercises can enhance this work.

Dr Deborah Hann

2 March 2023