Michael Goller

New Skills for New Jobs: Work Agency as a Necessary Condition for Successful Lifelong Learning

Individuals are permanently exposed to changes in today’s work environments due to strong economic competition and fast technological development. More and more frequently, employees face less job security, a higher need for flexibility, remarkable intensification of work and a strong demand for lifelong learning. In order to arrange daily working life self-dependently, individuals have to become active agents that do not passively react on the outcomes of such changes. This chapter provides a theoretical overview on the concept of work agency and its interdependence with participation in lifelong learning activities. Firstly, it clarifies the meaning and comprehension of the concept. Secondly, it relates the concept of work agency with the issue of lifelong learning. Finally, it provides an outlook on a research agenda how best to generate empirical evidence.

Agentic behaviour at work: Crafting learning experiences

A key priority for research on professional development is elaborating how employees become and remain high-performing workers who are able to effectively respond to the changing requirements of their work. This chapter focuses on how workers develop such high performance at work. It is proposed that current accounts of professional expertise development lack a consideration of the variety and breadth of work-relevant experiences necessary to generate expertise, including employees who deliberately contribute to that development. Although deliberate practice as originally conceptualised by Ericsson et al. (1993) may not be readably identifiable in work contexts, certainly analogous processes and other agentic efforts shape the quality of workplace learning. It is illuminated how employees can deliberately influence their expertise development by seeking additional work experiences and proactively securing information and feedback.

Effects of age, gender and occupation on perceived workplace learning support

The provision of workplace support is central to how and what is and can be learnt at work. Hence, the distribution of those experiences is an important factor in the quality of workplace learning experiences. The study reported and discussed here aims to identify differences in levels of support and opportunities for applying knowledge in workplaces among factors of age-, gender-, and occupation-related cohorts of employees across a range of levels of employment. A convenience sample of 459 employees from different occupations, companies and workplaces participated in this cross-sectional exploratory study. Comparisons between categories of age and occupation are based on the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test and comparisons regarding gender are performed with the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U-test. The results propose that for this sample neither age nor gender, but level of employment is the crucial factor. Put simply, the evidence suggests that those in better jobs, regardless of age or gender, receive more support for workplace learning.

Human Agency at Work: Towards a Clarification and Operationalisation of the Concept

This chapter proposes a conceptualisation and operationalisation of human agency in work contexts based on a larger literature review. In a first step, two conceptually different perspectives of human agency are discussed: (a) agency as something individuals do and (b) agency as a personal feature of individuals. Both perspectives are then integrated into a larger framework also including situation-specific context factors. In a second step, three distinct components of human agency as a personal feature of individuals are derived and discussed: (a) agency competence (i.e. the capacity to visualise desired future states, to set goals based on these states, to translate these goals into actions, to engage in these actions, and to deal with upcoming problems), (b) agency beliefs (i.e. perceptions of whether one is agentically competent or not), and (c) agency personality (i.e. a stable and comparable situation-unspecific inclination to make choices and to engage in actions based on these choices with the aim to take control over one’s life or environment). In a third step, the results of this theoretical discussion are then used to propose an operational definition of human agency that may be used in a range of empirical studies employing hypothesis-testing methods.

Employing Agency in Academic Settings: Doctoral Students Shaping Their Own Experiences

The majority of research on doctoral students’ success is aimed at the identification of personal and/or situational factors that contribute to PhD candidates’ attrition and persistence, respectively. By doing so, the literature has adopted a rather passive perspective towards PhD candidates and their development. The active role of candidates being agentic constructors of their academic career has been widely neglected. This study therefore focuses on how PhD students can take an active approach towards their academic development. A qualitative interview study with ten German faculty members was conducted to answer the following research questions: (1) How do supervisors conceptualise academic success of PhD students? (2) How does professional agency affect academic success of young researchers? (3) What individual and/or contextual factors affect the exercise of professional agency? Based on these interviews, evidence is reported on how doctoral candidates can indeed affect their academic development and eventually their success by exercising professional agency. Among others, the study participants mentioned proactive networking, negotiation of external demands and deliberate information and feedback seeking as important manifestations of professional agency in academic contexts.

The Multifaceted Nature of Agency and Professional Learning

The present volume has aimed to cover a broad range of approaches to agency at work, exploring its relationship with professional learning and development. Thus, the chapters included in this book have discussed the role of agency in learning and development, considering a variety of working life contexts and applying both conceptual and empirical perspectives. This final chapter provides an overview of both the conceptual approaches and the empirical implementations. We see the perspectives as complementary. From the content of the book, we discern the phenomena as falling on two main dimensions, clustering at opposite ends of these dimensions. Thus, the following contrasts are evidenced: (a) agency understood as a personal capacity, vs. agency as behaviour, and (b) agency as an individual phenomenon, vs. agency as a collective phenomenon. All the chapters emphasise that agency is needed for learning and development. However, they differ in how they view the relationships between the concepts. They also exhibit differences in the empirical decisions taken and the research strategies chosen. In this concluding chapter, we discuss the main similarities and differences emerging from the chapters. We also highlight avenues for future research on agency and its relationship with professional learning.

Digitalisation of Work: Between Affordances and Constraints for Learning at Work

The interconnection of computers and smart devices grants new possibilities of work organisation. The step from single computers as tools to a network of smart devices and computers describes the digitalisation of work. This chapter aims at empirically investigating the impact of these digitalisation tendencies on workplace learning in the field of administrative work. For this purpose, interviews with affected workers and human resource representatives, as well as members of the workers council, from three companies operating in different industries were conducted and analysed using qualitative content analyses. The findings give insights into how certain workplace characteristics conducive to work-related learning changed due to digitalisation efforts (job demands, job control, and social support). In addition, the contribution discusses how the different status groups (workers, HR representatives, and employee representatives) describe issues of digitalisation from their perspectives.

Study 2: Proposed Study Design, Instrument Development, and Pilot Study

This chapter intends to propose a research design and to compose a quantitative survey instrument suitable for answering the research questions posed in Chapter 4. Both are necessary since—until now—no comparable study exists that has investigated a similar set of research questions in the domain of geriatric care nursing. It follows that both the research design as well as the survey instrument have to be newly developed.

Study 3:Work Agency and Its Effect on Expertise Development

This chapter describes the third and final study of this thesis. The main aim of this study is to test the hypotheses underlying the advanced research model derived in Chapters 4 and 5. This will be done by employing hypothesis-testing methods on data gathered in the domain of geriatric care nursing.

Research Questions, Research Model, and Research Approach

The main research goal of this thesis is to provide a first attempt to empirically investigate the role of human agency in work-related learning and professional development processes by using hypothesis-testing methods. Such an attempt is highly justified since, while human agency has been intensively discussed within the WPL literature as an essential construct to explain learning and development in professional contexts (see Section 2.1), there has been no such investigative study to date.