Promoting Resilience with new Learning Cultures. Perception, Negotiation, Normalisation, and Enactment of Change in Workplace Learning

Abstract

ABSTRACT Technological, social, and economic changes challenge workers’ resilience at many levels. Innovative learning cultures have the potential to accommodate industry’s skills expectations with workers need for new forms of workplace learning. This study explores the role of learning cultures as (1) moderators between stability and change, (2) indicators for promoting resilience in VET, and (3) generators for new ideas and innovative approaches in VET. In probing how 26 actors involved in workplace learning negotiate new expectations and changes at their workplace, we arrive at a process model of resilience in workplace training that describes several steps of a perpetual process: Individuals need to perceive a change or new situation as such and then classify it as a form of disturbance. This is followed by a process of negotiation in w hich certain aspects of the change are tested and adopted. This can lead to rejection and exit or to a phase of normalisation where interpretations, adaptations, and internalisations take place. Finally, we argue that the role of new learning cultures is to ensure that new ideas and training concepts are eventually enacted constructively and beneficially by all actors involved in workplace training.