Career and learning: the ins and the outs of it
| Date | 01 August 2005 |
| Published date | 01 August 2005 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480510599789 |
| Pages | 468-487 |
| Author | Mary Mallon,Sara Walton |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Career and learning: the ins
and the outs of it
Mary Mallon
Department of Human Resource Management, Massey University,
Palmerston North, New Zealand, and
Sara Walton
Department of Management, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Abstract
Purpose – Seeks to explore how individuals talk about learning when asked about career.
Design/methodology/approach – Brings together three qualitative research studies, based in the
UK and New Zealand on how individuals make sense of career; one focused on people in organizational
employment and two on “portfolio” workers operating as freelance workers on a variety of contracts
with organizations. The debate on the changing nature of careers and the imperative to life-long
learning resonates in the studies and the extent of change that has occurred is questioned.
Findings – The findings of the studies suggest that there is less learning activity (in terms of
education, training or self-development activities) being undertaken by these participants than may be
expected. While participants generally believe that they should take charge of their own learning and
career development, they are less sure what actions to take. Signals from the organization are still an
important prompt for learning for those in employment; for those outside the lack of support and
specific reasons to learn leads to a lack of formal or structured learning activity and a tendency to rely
on previously learned skills.
Originality/value – The paper is offered in a spirit of exploration, based on signals from these
specific data. In that vein, it makes tentative suggestions as to the implications of such data for human
resource management.
Keywords Careers, New Zealand,Self development, Learning
Paper type Research paper
This paper explores what is said about learning when individuals are asked about
career. Our interest in this topic arose from analysis of data from three studies
conducted in the UK and New Zealand, one focused on people in organ izational
employment and two on “portfolio” workers operating as freelance workers on a
variety of contracts with organizations. The studies all explored how individuals make
sense of career in the context of challenges to traditional career patterns. These studies
did not set out specifically to study learning; rather they set out to explore how
individuals within and outside organizations were making sense of their career. In all
three studies learning emerged as a central feature of individuals’ accounts of their
careers.
To date the conjunction of learning and career has been subject to limited debate
and is often presented as taken for granted and unproblematic. In reporting how
participants believe career interacts with organizations and with the wider social
worlds and how learning investments and career outcomes relate, this paper offers a
contribution to both career theory and organizational learning theory. Further it
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm
PR
34,4
468
Received September 2003
Revised March 2004
Accepted April 2004
Personnel Review
Vol. 34 No. 4, 2005
pp. 468-487
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/00483480510599789
addresses the absence of the voice of individuals in organizational learning literature,
in human resource development (HRD) and even in careers (Antonacopoulou, 1999;
Friedman, 2001; Pringle and Mallon, 2003). Hence we offer this data, tentatively and in
the spirit of exploration, to contribute to and to invite further empirical exploration of
the multi-faceted ways in which individuals understand learning in career.
1. Career and learning
Recently career has been conceptualised as a boundaryless (Arthur and Rousseau,
1996), protean (Hall et al., 1996) or portfolio (Handy, 1994) adventure as opposed to the
traditional image of a linear and organizationally bound journey. Thus more atten tion
has been directed at career as a subjective matter, with meaning individually (or
collectively) held and enacted (Weick, 1996) rather than as an objectively observ able
phenomenon of paths and patterns of promotions.
Career as a forward focused and developmental notion implies learning but recent
literature is more explicit (e.g. Collin and Watts, 1996; Bird, 1996; Hall, 2002). Weick
(1996), for example, unequivocally identifies learning as a proxy for career success,
given decreasing opportunities for hierarchical advancement. Hall et al. (2002, p. 161)
suggest “contemporary careers might properly be viewed as a series of learning cycles
over the person’s life”. Employability is proposed as a more appropriate goal than the
ultimately hopeless (for many) quest for job security (Kanter, 1989) given the
discontinuous emergence of new career opportunities (Lichtenstein and Mendenhall,
2002). Learning is seen as the way to achieve it. A free-agent, career capitalist
philosophy has been encouraged (Pink, 2001; Inkson and Arthur, 2001) whereby the
individual acts as “Me Inc” (Bridges, 1995; Peters, 1999) and consciously develops and
trades skills and know how. The utility of many previous models of career
development are questioned (e.g. see Boyatzis and Kolb, 2000). Against this
background, career is increasingly being linked to learning “in a virtuous cycle”
(Arthur et al., 1999, p. 49).
Learning is treated generally as an unquestioned value in itself (Gherardi, 19 99) in
much of this up-beat literature (Peiperl and Arthur, 2000). It is represented as an
on-going individual process, driven by the life-long learning imperative and focused on
the development of learning and career meta-skills (Hall et al., 2002; Waterman et al.,
1994). Implicit is a “wake-up call” for individuals to rethink their view on car eer, their
links with organizations and their personal investment in learning, to move beyond
reliance on the firm-specific skills and training which may have traditionally sustained
them – and perhaps trapped them (Hirsch and Shanley, 1996).
Emerging empirical evidence though is equivocal about the extent and nature of
change, both in terms of embrace of the new and demise of the old (Nolan and Wood,
2003). While there is evidence that many organizations have shifted to a career
self-management philosophy (Adamson et al., 1998), other studies indicate that
organizations struggle to find any actionable meaning in the notion of employability
(Pascale, 1995; Baruch, 2001; Bryne, 2001). Indeed there is still evidence of lamentable
failure to provide even skill based training (Hallier and Butts, 1999), never mind to
implement the rhetoric of learning organizations (e.g. Woodall and Winstanley, 1998).
For individuals there are questions about the extent to which the time-consuming,
possibly costly and emotional investment of learning can be directed towards
uncertain outcomes and with no clear audience in mind (King, 2001; Knowles, 1984).
Career and
learning
469
To continue reading
Request your trial