Sustaining Employability Through Work-life Learning: Practices and Policies

This book seeks to advance understandings of and approaches to supporting and sustaining working age adults’ learning across lengthening working lives and inevitable transitions they encounter and are required to negotiate. It is founded on the processes and findings of a three-phase practical inquiry into worklife learning and its implications for workplace and educations’ practice conducted in Australia over a three-year period commencing in 2019. Diverse perspectives and orientations were utilised in approaches to data analysis and renderings from the data, thereby opening up the analysis of these complex phenomena to different lines of interrogation, questions and analytical approaches. It elaborates more fully understandings about the processes of adults’ learning and development across their lifespan of adulthood referred to as working life, and what factors and contributions supported that learning. This book also attempts to reconcile a coherent view about development across the work lifespan, and how that can be supported by education provisions, workplaces, communities, and by the adults themselves.

Dr Stephen Billett is Professor of Adult and Vocational Education at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. After a career in clothing manufacturing, he became a vocational educator, teacher educator, professional educator and held a policy role in Queensland. Since 1992, at Griffith University, he has researched learning through and for work and published widely in fields of learning for occupations, vocational education, workplace learning, work, higher education and conceptual accounts of learning for occupational purposes. He has been Fulbright scholar (1999), National Teaching Fellow (2009-11), ARC Future Fellow (2011-16) recipient of honorary doctorates from Jyvaskala University, Finland (2013) and University of Geneva (2020), elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia (2015), research fellow at Oxford University (2019-22), and adjunct professor at University of Stavanger, Norway (2019-23) and University Vast, Sweden (2019-). His current research projects are on: the standing of vocational education, integration of work experiences to promote university students’ employability, resilience in healthcare workers, worklife learning in an era of change, continuing education and training in Singapore and re-imaging rural general practice after CoVid19. He is the founding and editor in chief of the journal Vocations and Learning: Studies in Professional and vocational education, and the Professional and practice-based learning book series for Springer. Laurent Filliettaz is a full professor in Adult Education, Language and Work at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland. His expertise includes literacy issues in workplace contexts, multimodal interaction analysis in connection to learning and training practices in vocational education and training. He received his Ph.D. in linguistics in 2000 and has conducted numerous research projects over the years in areas such as pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics or discourse analysis. Laurent is the author of several books and articles published in French and English, analysing the role of language in the workplace and dealing with issues such as cooperation, problem solving, decision making, multiactivity, power, identity and learning. Laurent is currently leading several research programs sponsored by the Swiss national science foundation (SNF) and promoting applied linguistics methods in the field of vocational education and training.