In the EU, ambitious objectives have been set for education and training since the adoption of the Lisbon Agenda in 2000. The policies aim among other things to empower the individual through participation in lifelong learning which is seen as both a right and a duty: 'People need to want and to be able to take their lives into their own hands--to…

A skilled workforce is a prerequisite for productivity and a stepping stone for innovation. This is the reason why education and investment in skills have been made the foundations of Europe 2020, Europe's strategy to overcome the economic crisis and boost growth. The propensity for developing skills is consistently present in European countries…

Over 25 years ago, Brown and Duguid ("Organisation Science," 2(1), 40-57, 1991) highlighted the differences between the way organisations formally describe and delineate jobs and the actual practices of their employees. This paper combines ideas from their seminal contribution with theories of "job crafting" and identity to…

In the contemporary world, many people find themselves confused and challenged by unpredictability of life paths, labour market instability and necessary revisions to vocational careers. They may be helped by professional support institutions. For some people, seeking professional help when facing a predicament is evidence of resourcefulness.…

This paper uses evidence from an Australian research project into under-recognized skills in occupations, gathered through industry-level interviews and company case studies, to examine VET curricula. The project, funded by the Australian Research Council, focused on skill in jobs traditionally regarded in Australia as unskilled. As part of the…

In this paper we propose and discuss a framework for analysing adults' work competences while construing mathematics-containing "themes" in two workplace settings: road haulage and nursing. The data consist of videos and transcribed interviews from the work of two lorryloaders, and a nurses' aide at an orthopaedic department. In the…

The lifelong learning system in the Czech Republic and Slovakia share some common traits: traditional model with the dominant role of the initial education, low participation rates, lack of incentives and fragmentation. The results of the narrative research on 15 low-skilled persons demonstrated that negative attitudes towards education are often…

Thailand, a developing country, had labours migrating from the agriculture into the industrial due to higher pay in the past. However the economic force has made the government policy to focus on creativity and developing technology towards automatic production. Unskilled Thai labours are facing a big challenge after retirement, which is called…

Reports indicate that the criminal victimization of Latino immigrants in the United States has been increasing yet is often underreported. This may be especially true in new immigrant settlement cities that lack an established Latino community to provide support and feelings of security. New Orleans is an important context to investigate criminal…

This article explores a hitherto neglected issue: the significance of nature in the learning lives of marginalised young people. Drawing on both post-human and sociocultural perspectives, it develops a theoretical analysis of this important subject. It uses research with 114 young people in jobs without training in rural South-west England to…

In this paper we draw upon our findings from a project in the South West region of England. The research involved a collaboration between a group of university researchers and Connexions service personal advisers and mainly comprised interviews with young people, who were in "jobs without training" (JWT). A key aim of the research was to…

Untrained teachers are deployed in basic schools in many developing countries as a measure to address enrolment escalation; minimising the financial burden on the government, much of whose education budget is already a recurrent cost. However, there has been little research into untrained teachers. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this article…

In a survey conducted across eleven universities in the north of England, attendance figures for manual grade staff attending internal university training programmes was found to be significantly below that of other employee groups. This is unsatisfactory from an equal opportunity perspective since the ethos of a university should encompass all…

The current policy intention, that all young people remain in some form of accredited education or training to the age of 18 by 2015, poses significant challenges. The jobs without training (JWT) group includes young people who are in full-time work and not in receipt of training leading to National Vocational Qualification level 2 (or above);…

This book assembles over 50 papers from the 7th Triennial European Research Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), which was held from the 4th to the 7th of September 2013 at Humboldt-University in Berlin. The title of the conference was "Changing Configurations of Adult Education in Transitional…