Supporting Competency Development in Informal Workplace Learning

This paper seeks to suggest ways to support informal, self-directed, work-integrated learning within organizations. We focus on a special type of learning in organizations, namely on competency development, that is a purposeful development of employee capabilities to perform well in a large array of situations. As competency development is inherently a self-directed development activity, we seek to support these activities primarily in an informal learning context. AD-HOC environments which allow employees context specific access to documents in a knowledge repository have been suggested to support learning in the workplace. In this paper, we suggest to use the competence performance framework as a means to enhance the capabilities of AD HOC environments to support competency development. The framework formalizes the tasks employees are working in and the competencies needed to perform the tasks. Relating tasks and competencies results in a competence performance structure, which structures both tasks and competencies in terms of learning prerequisites. We conclude with two scenarios that make use of methods established in informal learning research. The scenarios show how competence performance structures enhance feedback mechanisms in a coaching process between supervisor and employee and provide assistance for self directed learning from a knowledge repository. 1 The Importance of Work-Integrated Learning In order to operate economically in business education the ratio between outcome and investment needs to be maximized. Investment in business education consists of financial contributions for courseware, learning management systems, training hours, and costs for employees being away from their workplaces. Outcome in business education should be learning results that can directly be transferred to employees’ workplaces and which have a high reinforcing impact on job performance. However, studies reveal that only a small amount of knowledge that is actually applied to job activities comes from formal training: Ley, T., Lindstaedt, S. N., & Albert, D. (2005). Supporting Competency Development in Informal Workplace Learning. In K. Althoff, A. Dengel, R. Bergmann, M. Nick & T. Roth-Berghofer (Eds.), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Professional Knowledge Management: Third Biennial Conference, WM 2005, Kaiserslautern, Germany, April 10-13, 2005, Revised Selected Papers (Vol. 3782 / 2005, pp. 189-202). Springer-Verlag GmbH.