LIFELONG LEARNING IN THE

WORKPLACE

CHRISTOPHER KNAPPER

We live in times of unprecedented technological and social change that have

profound implications for the nature of work, the workplace and our working
lives. Adaptability to shifting circumstances and readiness to learn new work-
related knowledge and skills have become almost more important than
competence at the tasks for which we were hired. Workers must now be able
to deal not just with issues for which they were trained, but also to tackle
unique problems that have never been faced before. This has major
implications for educational institutions, for employers and for workers, and
has led to calls for an emphasis on lifelong and life-wide learning. The idea
that we continue to learn throughout our lives, in all facets of our lives, and
from a wide range of resources, not just at school or university or in formal
courses. This paper explores the different ways we learn in and from work
and the factors that influence our effectiveness as lifelong learners. It is
argued that lifelong learning in the workplace is a mutual responsibility shared
by educational institutions, workers and employers.

H istorically we have made rather clear distinctions between

places where people learn (schools, universities) and those
where we earn our living. The notion of special places for
learning is deeply rooted in nearly all cultures, and the creation of the

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formal school is the first of Ashby’s four educational “revolutions”
that transformed our ability to learn and produce great advances in
civilisation (Carnegie Foundation, 1972)1. Yet human beings learn
throughout their lives and in almost all situations - at home, in their
leisure activities and at work. We start learning even before birth, and
we continue until senility. Some of this learning is incidental and
largely unconscious (for example finding out about our spouse’s
idiosyncrasies, or discovering a new route to work), but a large
amount of learning is planned and purposive (Tough, 1971). This is
what is meant by the notion of lifelong and life-wide learning.

Christopher Knapper
Director
Instructional Development Centre
Professor of Psychology 1
Queen’s University, Canada The other three of Ashby’s revolutions were the invention of writing, printing and the wide
availability of books, and (more controversially) the use of technology to enhance learning.

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Lifelong Learning in the Workplace

THE CONCEPT OF LIFELONG LEARNING

The term lifelong learning was first used 30 years ago by Edgar Faure in his seminal work for
Unesco, Learning To Be (Faure et al, 1972). When my colleague Arthur Cropley and I first began
writing about lifelong learning in the 1980s (Cropley and Knapper, 1983) the term was not widely
known. By 2001 it has become a ubiquitous slogan that appears in government position papers,
university mission statements and advertising literature for all manner of educational products and
services. It is an expression that has come to mean whatever its users want it to mean, with little
understanding of the original concept articulated by Faure, or knowledge of the underlying factors
that caused Unesco to put forward the notion of lifelong learning as a blueprint for universal
education.

The Need for Lifelong Learning

Why was this blueprint thought to be needed? Its origins were in fact quite idealistic and reflect
goals for education that stressed the need for democracy, equal opportunity, and individual self-
fulfilment, which would only be possible if the tools for learning were available to all, and not
restricted to a privileged elite. A second impetus for lifelong and life-wide learning came from the
increasing complexity of people’s lives and the rapid pace of change, both social and technological.
Such change is both profound and rapid, and its pace has accelerated as we enter the third
millennium. For example, Homer-Dixon comments that although the new communication
technologies have greatly widened the circle of people with whom we interact, this comes at a
price.

… we find ourselves more rushed in facing an expanding range of obligations and

responsibilities, because it is easier for other people to make demands on our time. Voice-
mail messages, E-mail letters, and faxes pile up. Meetings proliferate ... and when these new
communication technologies are combined with new technologies of travel and production,
everyone moves more, makes more things, and communicates more in interaction with more
people. Since we can all do more, we feel we must do more, because if we don’t we will be
left behind by our colleagues, neighbors and competitors. Thus the technologies that save us
time and labor individually – that empower each of us – bind us collectively in a frenetic
mad race in which we often feel more caged by obligations and demands than before. The
tools of our liberation often seem to imprison us.
(Homer-Dixon, 2000:102)

Homer-Dixon concludes that as the world, and our lives, become more complicated and faster-
paced we have a need for different ways of learning - ways that stress our ability to come up with
creative solutions to problems we have never seen before. Homer-Dixon refers to this as
“ingenuity”. We need to change the way we organise ourselves, solve problems, and deal with the
world around us. We must now “make more and better decisions faster than ever before” (Homer-
Dixon, 2000:120), and this partly implies our ability to work together and learn collaboratively. A
similar point was made 20 years earlier in an influential report for the Club of Rome by Botkin,
Elmandjra and Malitza (1979), who argued for a new type of learning that would be both
“participatory” (learning with others) and “anticipatory” (learning that could solve expected
problems in new ways).

One of the most profound areas of change in most people’s lives occurs in the world of work.
Knowledge and skills learnt in school or university rapidly become obsolete in an environment
where practices and processes change so rapidly that industries and jobs that have existed for
centuries can disappear almost overnight (Knapper and Cropley, 2000). In this context our
traditional notions of front-end-loaded “education by inoculation” will no longer serve, and
traditional continuing education through formal courses is often inadequate.

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 CHRISTOPHER KNAPPER

For example, MacBeath (2000) has distinguished between “old” and “new” ways of learning and
thinking. He argues we must now recognise that intelligence is not fixed at birth but is created and
recreated throughout our lifetimes. It is not just an individual quality, but resides both within and
between people. Learning is often episodic rather than logical and sequential, and most learning
takes place outside the classroom, not inside. Sternberg, in a series of influential papers, has
described the concept of “tacit knowledge” - the knowledge we need to succeed at a task that is not
formally taught, and may not even be verbalised (see Sternberg, Wagner and Okagaki, 1993). All
this implies a need for people to acquire more generic “learning to learn” skills that provide the
basis for lifelong (learning throughout life) and life-wide (learning from life) learning.

The Dimensions of Lifelong Learning

Knapper and Cropley (2000:47) have described the characteristics of a lifelong learner as someone
who is strongly aware of the relationship between learning and real life, recognises the need for
lifelong learning and is highly motivated to engage in the process, and has the necessary confidence
and learning skills. These skills include the following dimensions:

• lifelong learning
• people plan and monitor their own learning
• learners engage in self-evaluation and reflection
• assessment focuses on feedback for change and improvement

• life-wide learning
• learning is active, not passive
• learning occurs in both formal and informal settings
• people learn with and from peers
• learners can locate and evaluate information from a wide range of sources
• learners integrate ideas from different fields
• people use different learning strategies as needed and appropriate
• learning tackles real-world problems
• learning stresses process as well as content.

Candy, Crebert and O'Leary (1994:43), in an influential report for the Australian government,
summed up the characteristics of lifelong learner in a slightly different way. According to them,
such people have:

• an inquiring mind characterised by a love of learning, curiosity, a critical spirit, and self-
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monitoring of their own learning
• “helicopter” vision involving mastery of a particular field paired with broad vision and a
sense of the interconnectedness of different fields
• information literacy, including skill in locating, retrieving, decoding (from different sources,
such as words, charts or diagrams), evaluating, managing and using information
• learning skills focused on “deep” learning (deduction of general principles underlying
specific knowledge that can be applied in novel situations, not just ones identical to the
situation in which the learning occurred)
• a sense of “personal urgency” deriving from a favourable self-concept, self-organising skills,
and a positive attitude to learning.

Before leaving the topic of the characteristics of lifelong learning it is important to state what
lifelong learning is not - it is not lifelong schooling. Rather, the concept stresses the importance of
having people take responsibility for their own learning, while the task of educators is to provide an
environment in which this can be done most effectively.

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THE WORKPLACE AS A SETTING FOR LEARNING

It is clear that the characteristics of a lifelong learner described here are highly relevant to the
people’s work lives, especially in the complex and rapidly changing work environments that are
increasingly typical of the modern world. My father would not particularly have thought of the
factory where he worked as an opportunity for learning new skills, but nowadays the workplace is
seen as much as a place for learning as an organisation that manufactures goods or provides
services. Business environments are characterised by greater competitiveness in global markets,
pressure to reduce costs, and increased use of technology, which places substantial demands on
management and employees (Watkins and Marsick, 1993). One way of coping is to empower
workers, encourage the use of autonomous teams and give employees a greater say in management
decisions.

Indeed it has been suggested that successful organisations should themselves “learn” (Senge,
1990). According to Watkins and Marsick (1993), a learning organisation is one that is responsive
to the larger context or environment, promotes discussion, team learning and collaboration among
employees, empowers employees towards a “collective vision”, develops systems to monitor and
share learning, and creates ongoing learning opportunities for workers. These characteristics are
certainly consistent with the idea of lifelong and life-wide learning, but in fact a good deal of the
discussion of the learning organisation concept is at a conceptual level. It is much more difficult to
operationalise the idea to show what types of workplace learning occur, how such learning takes
place, what contextual factors encourage or hinder such learning, and what effects this might have
upon employee attitudes, morale and effectiveness.

It is important to distinguish here between learning and training, which is the traditional way in
which organisations and educational institutions have prepared employees for work tasks. Just as
lifelong learning is a slogan for the 21st century, training was the key concept for the last century.
Employers, politicians and the public often call for training as a solution to a wide range of
problems and, in the sense that this implies appropriate preparation and the necessary knowledge
and skills, this is perfectly reasonable. However, one problem with traditional models of training is
that the process is often conceived as something that is “done to” employees by outside agencies,
whereas learning by definition is the ultimate responsibility of the individual doing it.

If training is restricted to telling or “drilling” then it may have limited effectiveness in the rapidly
evolving and complex work environments that Homer-Dixon and others have described. Even the
idea of “evidence-based practice” (involving research ¤ translation ¤ adoption - see Roche, 2000)
implies that there are two sorts of people - experts (or researchers) who know how things should be
done and practitioners whose role it is to acquire this knowledge and use it. I would argue that
skills and knowledge have to be incorporated into the practitioner’s experience and adapted in the
light of insights acquired from other learning sources (for example colleagues).

In the field of preventative health it is not necessary to emphasise that simply knowing something
does not inevitably translate into a change of attitude or behaviour, as is demonstrated by the
failure of many people to wear seat belts, reduce alcohol consumption, or stop smoking. Lifelong
learning is a transformative process (see Cranton, 1994) that changes both the learner and the
context (Roche, 2000). One of the successes of the Japanese quality circles used over the past three
decades in the automobile industry is that management listened to employees’ suggestions and
were willing to make changes when needed. The fact that they were less successful in North
America probably indicates that management did not fully recognise the interrelationship between
learning, environment and organisational change.

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 CHRISTOPHER KNAPPER

APPROACHES TO LEARNING AT WORK

Although there is considerable information about formal training programs in business and
industry, there has been rather little empirical research on the ways employees typically learn in the
workplace. It is likely that some information or skills are acquired through courses or manuals, but
it also seems plausible that a great deal of learning takes place much more informally, for example
by trial and error, by seeking the advice of a colleague, searching the World Wide Web and so on.

Differences Between School and Workplace Learning

While a great deal is known about learning in school and university, it seems likely that the
educational and workplace environments are rather different. For example, students often have
more choice in what they study, a good deal of what they learn is conceptual rather than
performance-focused, and it is often documented in books rather than being related to a particular
need or situation. In addition, the goals of learning at work are much more immediate and obvious
than is the case in most educational settings (Candy and Crebert, 1991; Warr and Allan, 1998).

Candy and Crebert identify a number of further differences. They suggest that academic learning
generally involves propositional knowledge, is decontextualised, encourages eloquent solutions,
and tends to be individualistic and competitive. Workplace learning on the other hand generally
involves procedural knowledge, is contextualised by the nature of the organisation, deals with real
pragmatic problems, and often depends on collaborative teamwork. In this context the importance
of lifelong learning skills becomes crucial, and Candy and Crebert argue for an emphasis on
assisting employees to develop multiple skills that could enable them to transfer knowledge to a
wide range of contexts. This in turn requires an ability to integrate new information with previous
knowledge and make connections to form a wider perspective.

Is it possible to measure lifelong learning in the workplace? This was a challenge that some
colleagues and I undertook in a series of studies focused on approaches to learning at work and the
factors that encourage effective workplace learning. Our focus has been upon lifelong and life-
wide learning in the broad sense of those terms described earlier, but with a particular focus upon
what we have termed “deep” learning and the characteristics of organisations that encourage its
development.

Work Settings and Deep Learning

By deep learning we mean learning that emphasises the pursuit of meaning and understanding
(Marton and Saljo, 1976a, 1976b). Deep learners are intrinsically motivated to learn, and the act of
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learning is itself rewarding. The major goal is to integrate new learning and ideas with existing
understanding. Surface learners on the other hand are primarily motivated to meet minimum task
requirements, and they see learning as primarily a matter of reproducing information without any
particular interest in its meaning. Of course all of us frequently engage in surface learning just to
get through the many tasks we face in our everyday lives and surface learning may indeed be
appropriate for many routine tasks at work. But to meet the challenges of change and complexity
described by Homer-Dixon and others, I would argue that workplaces today will increasingly
require approaches to learning that stress depth in the sense of conceptual understanding and
integration of new knowledge with existing ideas in order to solve complex novel problems.

There is a long tradition in higher education of research on deep and surface learning, much of it
pioneered by Australians such as John Biggs, David Kember, Paul Ramsden, Keith Trigwell, David
Watkins, and others (for a review of some of their contributions see Knapper and Cropley, 2000).
Of particular interest is research done by Ramsden and Entwistle (1981) that shows the effect of the
institutional climate on acquisition of deeper learning approaches (or the reverse - adoption of more
surface approaches). My colleagues and I have attempted to build on this body of research to

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understand approaches to learning in the workplace and factors in the work environment that
encourage different types of lifelong learning.

Measuring Workplace Learning

Our work has involved developing scales that will measure approaches to learning in the workplace
and the organisational climate affecting learning, using adaptations of instruments originally
devised to measure learning in university. The initial study (Knapper, 1995) was done with 226
Canadian cooperative education students who were on extended work placements. Four
provisional findings emerged. First, it was clear that the work did involve learning and respondents
were comfortable describing their workplace as somewhere that they engaged in learning on a
regular basis. Second, individuals were generally consistent in their approach to learning across
work and university settings. If they adopted a deep approach in their university studies, they
tended to have a similar approach at work. Third, and perhaps surprisingly, the requirements for
deep learning were greater in many of the work settings than they were in university. Fourth,
despite problems with the psychometric properties of the scales, there appeared to be a relationship
between deep learning and the characteristics of the workplace, in particular the quality of
supervision.

The two scales (the Approaches to Work Questionnaire and the Workplace Climate Questionnaire)
have now been refined in a series of studies involving many hundreds of respondents. These have
included bank employees, nurses, physicians and Queen’s University alumni working in a wide
range of settings (Delva, Knapper, Kirby, and Birtwhistle, 2001; Kirby, Knapper, and Carty, 1997).
Although much more needs to be done, we believe we have instruments that are reasonably robust,
and that are helping to shed light on the interrelationships between organisational environment and
learning approaches at work.

We have found that the deep-versus-surface distinction characteristic of school and university
learning is somewhat more complex in the workplace. Although there is a clear deep dimension,
surface learning can be of two types. The first we have called “surface-rational” (routine surface-
level tasks necessary to get the job done) and the second we have named “surface-disorganised” -
here the individual sets very low learning goals and struggles to achieve them. For example, an
item characteristic of a deep approach would be “In my job one of the main attractions for me is to
learn new things”. A surface-rational item would be “When I learn something new at work I put a
lot of effort into memorising important facts”. And a surface-disorganised item would be “Often I
have to read things without having a chance to really understand them”.

Analysis of data from the Workplace Climate Questionnaire revealed three key factors. The first
we called Good Supervision (the extent to which supervisors or managers encourage independent
learning and creativity). The second was named Workload and is self-explanatory. Our term for
the third was Choice-Independence, and reflects the amount of freedom employees enjoy to
organise their own program of work, including necessary learning. Representative items include
“managers/supervisors here make a real effort to understand difficulties employees may be having
with their work” (Good Supervision), “the workload here is too heavy” (Workload), and “there is a
real opportunity in this organisation for people to choose the tasks they work on” (Choice-
Independence).

Having developed scales that we feel have reasonable reliability and validity, we went on to
investigate links between employees’ learning approaches and workplace characteristics.
Preliminary data from our alumni and bank employees shows that there are indeed significant
correlations between factors on the two scales. For example, choice-independence is positively
correlated with deep learning and negatively with both types of surface learning. Good supervision
is positively correlated with deep learning and negatively with surface-disorganised learning.
Finally, the highest significant correlation is between surface-disorganised learning and a

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perception of heavy workload. Interestingly, these results are quite similar to findings on the
approaches to learning adopted by university students in both Britain and Canada (Bertrand and
Knapper, 1991; Ramsden and Entwistle, 1981).

More recently we have found a similar pattern of correlations for our sample of physicians. Our
data also show that workplace climate and learning approaches are meaningfully related to doctors’
pursuit of continuing medical education opportunities (Delva et al, 2001). For example, those with
a deep approach prefer to pursue further education independently, rather than taking traditional
courses. They are also strongly inclined to be self motivated for continuing professional education,
whereas those with a surface approach respond to externally imposed requirements.

We have also developed a more general scale that we hope will measure broader aspects of lifelong
learning, and are presently using this with a population of university graduates that we are
following into the workplace to study the transition from university to work and to help determine
whether approaches to learning in school serve people well in their careers.

THE SPECIAL CASE OF TECHNOLOGY

A good deal of the commentary on the changing workplace focuses on rapid developments in use
of technology, and there is considerable interest in exploring what role technology might play in
learning at work. Since almost all of us use technology in our jobs, it seems clear that employees
will need to acquire technological literacy, and it is tempting for both business and higher
education to invest large sums into training in different computer applications. However, I believe
that the fundamental principles of lifelong learning summarised earlier apply to technology-based
learning just as they do to other approaches. Indeed, since technology changes so fast, knowledge
and skills acquired one year may be antiquated the next, and the importance of generic “learning to
learn” skills may be especially crucial.

In addition to learning about technology, learning with technology also has many attractions for
business and industry, especially if it is seen to reduce the cost of more traditional training, or
employees can be persuaded to learn in their own time rather than during working hours. Is the use
of computer-mediated learning consistent with lifelong and deeper learning? Elsewhere (Knapper,
1988; Knapper and Cropley, 2000) I have argued that it is a mixed picture. Certainly, the
communication possibilities of the Internet greatly expand the number of learning opportunities and
the possibility of learning from a much wider range of colleagues. On the other hand, one
characteristic of the World Wide Web is that it makes available unlimited amounts of information

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without providing effective tools for evaluation, interpretation and integration, which is an
important requirement of effective lifelong learning.

To explore these issues further I am involved with colleagues at Queen’s University in a major
research project that focuses on lifelong learning and technology, exploring the way that different
university students (in nursing, general arts and computer science) learn with and about technology
in their undergraduate programs, and the extent to which the acquired knowledge and skills reflect
the use of technology in the workplace that they eventually enter. So many claims are made about
the potential of technology to transform both education and the workplace that it is important to
gather empirical data that can shed light on learning as it takes place in real situations.

SUMMING UP
The research I have briefly summarised above has tried to set out some characteristics of lifelong,
life-wide and deep learning that might help individuals cope with an increasingly complex and
rapidly changing world. While lifelong learning skills are helpful for all aspects of people’s lives,
they are especially appropriate in the workplace where the demands of complexity and change are
often felt most urgently. Emerging empirical evidence from my own research and that of others

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shows that Senge is right in saying that workplaces are also environments where learning does and
should take place. It is clear that most employees already spend a good deal of their time at work
learning new tasks and solving new problems. Their success in meeting these challenges is partly
within the control of the individual employee (the lifelong learner), but also greatly affected by the
organisational climate. For workers, employers and society at large this involves tradeoffs -
tradeoffs between authority and autonomy, between workload and depth of learning, between
efficiency and creativity. If the world needs more ingenuity, and I believe with Homer-Dixon that
it does, then the empowerment of workers as lifelong learners will be an important prerequisite.

\
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Author Contact Details

Christopher Knapper
Professor of Psychology
Director, Instruction Development Centre
Queen’s University
Kingston
Ontario
Canada
Ph: 0011 1 3 533 6428
Fax: 0015 1 3 533 6735
knapper@psyc.queensu.ca

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