Elaborating the relations amongst workers' learning, innovations and well-being is essential for achieving two important and dual goals in contemporary work life. The first is individuals' ongoing learning that underpins their employability and can respond to new challenges and emerging occupational and workplace requirements. The second comprises…

Participation in designated learning opportunities and engagement in workplace learning are very different kinds of professional learning activities: Whereas the former takes place in organised, predefined settings with intended learning objectives, the latter mostly arises as a by-product through everyday experiences at work. Yet, empirical and…

In addition to well-being, workplace learning has gained increasing interest in supporting employee and organizational development and success. Focusing on specific factors affecting workplace learning and well-being, this study examines the links between individual factors (basic psychological need satisfaction) and environmental factors…

In this article, we explore workers' stories about digitalization of work and professional development. The data (101 stories) were collected from 81 Finnish government workers through the method of empathy-based stories (MEBS). MEBS is a qualitative data collection method in which participants write short imaginary texts based on an introductory…

The aim of this article is to investigate how the formal competence development activities provided by the Production Leap, a workplace development programme (WPDP), were interwoven with everyday work activities and to identify the conditions that enabled learning and employee-driven innovation that contributed to production improvement, in small…

The concept of "negotiation" is often used to describe and explain the interactive nature of vocational learning. Such learning is accomplished as workers engage in the joint activities that comprise their occupational practice. In doing so they interact with the material and cultural resources that enable their work to produce and…

The aim is to explore challenges related to the integration between product development and production in product introduction and, given these challenges, to analyse the learning potential of boundary crossing in the context of product introduction. The paper draws on evidence from a Swedish manufacturing company. The theoretical framework is…

Health care organizations are facing rapid changes, frequently involving modification of existing procedures. The case study reported here examined change processes and learning in a health care organization. The organizational change in question occurred in the emergency clinic of a Finnish central hospital where a new action model for…

Workplace learning is becoming a central tenet for a large proportion of today's employees. This seems especially true for so-called knowledge workers. Today, it remains unclear how differences in the quality of workplace learning are affected by differences in perception of the workplace environment and the motivation of knowledge workers to…

Today, organizations are increasingly implementing assessment tools such as Personal Development Plans. Although the true power of the tool lies in supporting the employee's continuing professional development, organizations implement the tool for various different purposes, professional development purposes on the one hand and promotion/salary…

Work in call centres is often presented as a form of unskilled labour characterized by routinization, technological surveillance and tight management control aimed at reaching intensive performance targets. Beyond delivering business objectives, this control and efficiency strategy is often held to produce counterproductive effects with regard to…

In Finnish VET, students' work experience is explicitly defined as workplace learning, instead of the practice of already learnt skills. Therefore, vocational students' learning periods in the workplace are goal-oriented, guided and assessed. This paper examines the characteristics of students' workplace learning and compares them with the…

Based on the Demand-Control-Support (DCS) model, the present paper aims to investigate the influence of job characteristics such as job demands, job control, social support at work and self-directed learning orientation on the work-related learning behaviour of workers. The present study was conducted in a centre for part-time vocational education…

This paper explores the concept of apprenticeship in the context of the professional formation of knowledge workers. It draws on evidence from research conducted in two knowledge intensive organizations: a research-intensive, elite university; and a "cutting edge" software engineering company. In the former, we investigated the learning…

Vocational training and skills are playing an increasingly important role in the developed economies. However, both the vocational education structure and the underlying philosophy and culture of education and training vary from country to country. What is clear, though, is that employers play a crucial role in all cases; this paper explores the…