learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Antonios Andreatos
Hence, enterprises should strengthen personal development of their employees in non-formal
learning courses developed especially for their staff (Andreatos, 2011). Fonstad & Lanvin (2010) have
found that organisations invest in at the following alternatives for developing the competences of their
employees:
In-house training provided by a university;
In-house training provided by a consulting firm;
In-house training provided by employees;
External business degree programs;
External ICT degree programs;
External university courses;
A combination of the above options.
Professional development goes hand in hand with organisational development; therefore,
organisations ought to foster employees' continuing education in various ways. Lifelong learning is
needed, with courses focusing on the skills most needed by the organisation, as well as, specific
inter-disciplinary modules related to entrepreneurship, e-business, lifelong learning, face to face and
distance cooperation, communicative and ICT -related skills. The certification of informally acquired
knowledge and skills by official formal education degrees such as master's or doctoral titles or even
by informal titles awarded by the company (such as “technical expert”), constitute ways to promote
and foster creativity.
2. Learning at the workplace
Several schemes for the continuing education of employees have been proposed (Ley et al., 2008;
Fonstad & Lanvin, 2010; Andreatos, 2011) with varying cost (Workforce Readiness Report, 2006, p.
46). Courses could be offered either face-to-face or from distance by universities or specialised
continuing education organisations, either public or private, or either by the enterprises themselves
(e.g. the Human Resources Dept). However, such programmes are often difficult or even impossible
for small enterprises to run, especially in crisis periods; hence, other alternatives should also be
examined, such as in-house training provided by experienced or specialised employees (Fonstad &
Lanvin, 2010, p. 21) and self-directed learning.
Other reasons calling for learning at the workplace are: the direct application of knowledge to current,
real job activities hence maximisation of the learning transfer, the maintainance of knowledge work,
and hence, the increase of productivity (Haskell, 2001; Ley et al., 2008). Aligning learning to
organisational goals and task requirements is an important factor posing challenges for traditional
personnel development instruments and trainings. How this alignment can be addressed within
knowledge work remains an open issue (Elkjaer, 2000).
2.1 Cost reduction of lifelong learning
In-house continuing education saves direct costs such as fees as well as indirect costs related to
employees' absence. However, in-house continuing education programmes still have a cost related to
tutor compensation, cost of educational materials, learning need analysis etc.
In order to reduce cost, organisations may take advantage of their asset such as social capital and
communities of practice.
Social capital refers to knowledge artifacts and resources are stored within organisational databases.
A more formal definition given by Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998: p. 243) is the following: social capital
is “the sum of the actual and potential resources embedded within, available through and derived from
the network of relationships possessed by an individual or social unit”.
A community of practice (abbreviated as CoP) is an important intra-organisational structure that has
been proven to effectively promote informal learning (Wenger, 1998; Andreatos, 2009a). A CoP is a
human network enabling professionals to communicate either face-to-face or virtually (vCoPs) and
25