work experience that provide a foundation for young people to make a transition into
work contexts that involve addressing routine as well as novel work problems.
The third issue Beach’s work identifies is that work experience constitutes a form of
‘horizontal development’ (Beach 1999). Traditionally, most studies of human
development assume that the process of knowledge and skill acquisition are
hierarchical processes that either involve apprehending sets of concepts of ever greater
abstraction or involve mastering higher levels of technical or craft-based skill, in other
words codified knowledge. Beach argues that learning at work is a ‘horizontal’
process, by that he means young people acquire ‘situated’ knowledge rather than
codified knowledge. And moreover, this situated knowledge can take a variety of
forms. It could be knowledge about how to participate in a ‘community of practice’,
change and vary work practices or hoew to connect diferetn fragments of codified
knowledge to resolve work problems. Consequently, Beach argues that if young people
are to benefit from work experience, they have to ‘learn how to negotiate their own
learning’ in a new context and in a different way from how they learn in school or
college.
Beach’s analysis suggests, therefore, that it is not work experience per se that is
inspiring and that leads young people to develop the generic skills that enables them to
‘learn how to negotiate their own learning’, or to use their codified knowledge to
analyse workplace problems debate critically different ways of tackling such problems.
Rather it is the meaningful and dialogic engagement in a ‘community of practice’,
inspired by a shared motive, that helps students to filter out actions, arguments and
solutions and thereby develop their teamwork or problem-solving capabilities. In this
sense, his analysis recognises an extra dynamic in the process of learning through work
experience, one which must involve the exploration of new territory for which pre-
learned response and solutions are unavailable. Consequential transitions involve the
construction of new knowledge, identities and skills or the transformation (rather than
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