Learning in Practice: What Organizational and Management Literature Can Contribute to Professional and Occupational Development

Abstract

Organizations, occupations and professions usually invest a great deal of effort in training and other forms of purposive hands-on processes, so that their members learn the practices that belong to their job. However, this investment does not always pay off or, at least, not in proportion to the effort. It is also true that not all learning occurs through these mechanisms: members of a firm or an occupation continue to learn - or may forget what they learned - during their practice. For these reasons, practitioners and scholars in different fields have naturally paid, and continue to pay, great attention to learning processes, especially those that occur in work practice. This paper is intended to provide an overview of the contributions that the management and organizational literature has made in the field of professional and occupational development by focusing on how this literature understands learning in practice.