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Meg Whitman, the CEO of Hewlett Packard recently commented that the market is changing so rapidly that layoffs were necessary. This scenario highlights a real shift in how individuals need to develop and market themselves in the new economy. In the 20th century, it was normal to see a managerial career develop within a single corporation over the course of many decades. A new trend developed at the end of the last century and in the 21st century. Recently, managerial careers have rarely been seen developed over long periods of time under the auspices of one organization. This trend often means an individual progresses beyond the boundaries of a single organization, industry or profession. Instead, management personnel find themselves in a protean business environment that requires continuous adjustment and strategic learning driven by analysis, application, and assessment to remain on an upward career trajectory. This learning process has been called career-related continuous learning (CRCL) and it can involve both self-initiated learning and formal on the job training.
Career-related continuous learning as a construct evolved from self-determination theory as a way to explain the learning phenomenon that seemed to exist as a method for coping with the protean careers that were common in the latter part of the last century. As individuals saw the organization loosening its role as a guide to career maturation, an instinctive engagement to develop one’s self took over as a way to fill the gap the organizations began to neglect. This meant individuals had less loyalty to those organizations and increased worker mobility became more prevalent; however, increased mobility meant an individual had a need to focus learning beyond organizational culture and task function and more toward developments within industries or disciplines that were marketable to the global economy.
Career-related continuous learning is a recent phenomenon that has little research on the subject. In fact, the last decade saw the first instrument to test CRCL be developed by Dr. Kuznia. The instrument is a 25-item survey that measures the four factors of CRCL: traditional learning, self-directed learning, assessment, and application. Traditional learning is defined as learning that one engages in under the sponsorship of the organization; whereas, self-directed learning is initiated and controlled by the learner. Assessment is the act of the individual reflecting on what has been learned and what learning is required to meet a challenge or goal. Application is implementing and putting into action what has been learned. Learning has little to no value if it is not applied to produce an outcome. The entire process is continuous and the factors happen either sequentially or simultaneously, congruent to one another.
The career-related continuous learning construct was informed by multiple learning theories. First, self-determination theory has helped to explain the motivation behind career-related continuous learning. The andragogy assumptions helped to establish the conditions in which a learner engages in CRCL and establishes many of the principles at the core of the adult learning process. Self-directed learning theory created the foundations for informal forms of career-related continuous learning, which occur at the direction and necessity of the individual learner as required to meet a challenge, or enhance and develop a skill. Transformative learning helped to explain what occurs within an individual as a result of assessment and application of one’s own experiences and the experiences of others. Finally, experiential learning theory assisted CRCL in providing direction to the continuous cycle of learning that observation and experience provides to the process for individual development. Subsequent blog posts will flesh out the details and role of these and other theories play in CRCL and how they might assist in managing through the new learning process necessary for managers to stay relevent and marketable in a rapidly changing business environment.