Skill and work experience in the European knowledge economy



these types of transition occur when new technology is introduced in workplaces and
workers often have to develop new skills without being able to seek advice from more
experienced staff who, themselves, are still coming to terms with the change.

The concept of consequential transition is relevant to re-thinking how work experience
might support students to learn and develop in several senses. First, it can be used to
question the conventional notion that moving from school-to-work is relatively
unproblematic provided students have the appropriate skills and personal attitudes.
Such a view supports the idea that it is a fairly straightforward matter of building
‘employability skills’ into school/work curricula (Taylor 1998). This approach fails to
acknowledge that formal and informal learning serve quite different purposes. The aim
of the former is to ensure that students acquire the ‘codified’ knowledge that is
required in order to pass examinations, while the aim of the latter is to supports
students to acquire the ‘everyday’ knowledge that may help them to operate effectively
in workplaces. This suggests that far greater thought has to be given as to how to
support students to use their formal and informal learning to develop new insights and
build new knowledge.

Second, it reminds educators and policymakers that transition is not merely a matter of
‘launching’ a student to learn in a workplace. Workplaces are very different and
learning opportunities are not distributed equally across them. In ‘knowledge-poor’
workplaces, for example a Fast Food restaurant, learning goes on and is expected, but
it is not a high priority, relative to delivery, the primary goal of most activities is to
support a highly standardised form of product and service delivery. The knowledge and
skill that can be acquired are unlikely to have little value outside of that specific
context of work. In contrast, in ‘knowledge-rich’ workplaces young people are likely to
have opportunities to participate in specialist ‘communities of practice’ and be
encouraged to engage in activities that allow them to acquire broader forms of
knowledge and skill. This implies that one of the challenges is to design models of

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