Thursday 5 July 2012

Mr Eric Lee, Facilitating learning in mid-career transitions

Mr Eric Lee is the Principal Research Manager in the Research Division of the Institute for Adult Learning. Eric reported on some interesting outcomes from his recently completed Masters dissertation on facilitating learning in mid-career transitions. In an age of rapid economic and social globalisation, particularly within local contexts of job redefinition and redundancy, many workers are often forced to shift into new roles, which is often threatening. Eric has developed a three phase facilitation process that hopes to reduce the potential anxieties faced by transitees. He calls this 'Ready (functional), Realise (advanced), Respond (professional).' The aim of the process is to re-form, support and build transitees' new feelings of workplace self-efficacy. In this way workers should feel more comfortable and proficient in their new surroundings. Eric presented a wide-range of transitee case-studies to support elements of his model. In many ways, Eric's work re-emphasises IAL's role to conduct research that is theoretically and methodologically sound, is based on Singaporean labour market needs, and produces pragmatic outcomes of value to individual workers.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the succinct interpretation, Peter. I hope the proposed facilitative framework may also inform AEs, curriculum developers, HR practioners redeploying their human capital, etc. I had forgotten to acknowledge and thank the six participants of this study for their invaluable life stories without whom this would not have been possible. I'm optimistic that people are starting to be more open to participating in research and sharing their opinions and experiences to grow the community and move us forward in our understanding of adult work & learning.

    ReplyDelete