AERA PAPER, Chicago, April 2003

Learning During the First Three Years of
Postgraduate Employment – The LiNEA Project

AERA PAPER, Chicago, April 2003

Professor Michael Eraut

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, TLRP Programme

Research Team: Professor M. Eraut, S. Steadman, J.Furner

(University of Sussex)

Professor F. Maillardet, Professor C. Miller, Dr A. Ali, C. Blackman

(University of Brighton)

Learning in the first professional job: the first year of full time employment after college for Accountants, Engineers and Nurses

Michael Eraut, Fred Maillardet, Carolyn Miller, Stephen Steadman, Amer Ali, Claire Blackman, Judith Furner

Introduction

This paper reports findings from the first phase of a four-year research project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Teaching and Learning Research Programme. The major component of this project is a longitudinal study of trainee accountants, graduate trainee engineers, and newly qualified nurses in England. This critical period of introduction to professional work has not been previously studied by a longitudinal series of observations and interviews, though a number of one-off surveys have been conducted. The three professions have been chosen for three reasons: (1) they play key roles in the UK economy and public services, (2) they use contrasting approaches to professional formation and (3) the applicants have prior experience of working with them and were able to find user partners wanting to participate in the research.

The accountants and engineers are formally contracted trainees, for whom employers have developed systems of organised training support. Hence we have added a second, action research, component to the study, which uses the findings of the first phase to assist our partner employers to make appropriate modifications to their first year support arrangements for new recruits. The evaluation of such modified arrangements with a new first year cohort will start in Autumn 2003, and findings from the second two-year phase of the longtitudinal study will also be too late for inclusion in this paper.

Research Questions

The first question comes from Eraut et al’s (2000) study of mid-career professionals’ learning in the workplace, while the second is a natural extension of that previous work:

1) To ascertain what is being learned, how it is being learned and the factors affecting the level and direction of learning effort; and contribute to theoretical understanding of learning in non-formal contexts.

2) To further develop research methods for investigating learning in the workplace.

However, in this project, we are interested in the extent to which novices, whose learning is more explicitly on the agenda and who have far less experience, learn differently from the mid-career professionals, whose learning was found to be largely implicit, taken for granted and difficult to elicit or elucidate. Hence the other two questions are more directly associated with the transition from Higher Education into employment:

3) To investigate the use and extension of prior technical knowledge and generic skills brought into employment from higher education and other life experience; and contribute to theoretical understanding of transfer.

4) To make recommendations for the development of evidence-based practice in the management and support of newly graduated and /or newly qualified employees.

Methodology

The methodological problems encountered in the previous study of mid-career professionals were discussed in Eraut et al (1999). In this current study the recognised novice status of our subjects, as well as better funding, made it possible to base our data collection on short (1-2 day) visits to each subject’s workplace, rather than interviews alone. The additional features are prolonged periods of observation, interviews with trainees’ managers / mentors and brief discussions with significant others in the workplace. This enables us to use workplace documents and activities as starting points for conversations about embedded knowledge and its acquisition during subsequent interviews. Four visits are to be made to each subject in the longitudinal study, and this paper reports findings from the first visits to all participants.

The majority of our subjects were recruited through 12 partner employers and a minority through their Higher Education institutions. This paper concentrates on groups of 6-8 novices recruited by the partner employers, a sample of about 90 subjects, some of whom were first contacted through their universities. The rationale for this approach is that each subject is located in a different workplace or succession of workplaces. Our sampling strategy is designed to maximise our ability to differentiate between individual, local workplace and organisational factors affecting learning within a basically qualitative research approach. The group discussed in this paper comprised:

40 nurses from 6 district general hospitals or teaching hospitals.

27 engineers from 4 companies in avionics, building services, civil engineering

and telecommunications.

16 accountants from large ‘Grade A’ firms, i.e. neither from the big four

international firms nor from small local practices.

Theoretical Perspectives

This discussion is organised around three main questions:

• What is being learned and how is prior knowledge being used and expanded?
• What is the influence of the structuring of work and learning and of social relations in the workplace?
• What factors affect motivation and engagement in learning in the workplace, and are they amenable to modification by appropriate intervention strategies?

Our perspective on the first question about prior knowledge and learning follows the published findings of the previous project on the learning of mid-career professionals (Eraut et al 2000) and an earlier project on how nurses learn to use scientific knowledge in practical situations (Eraut et al 1995). These encountered problems associated with tacit knowledge, non-formal learning, the denial of the need for substantial further learning before being able to use theoretical knowledge in practice, and debates about appropriate approaches to the representation of competence and expertise. Issues concerned with transfer of knowledge from college settings to workplace settings are discussed in Eraut (2003).

Our framing of the second question on work structures and social relations has developed significantly in the last two years (Eraut 2002, Miller 2002). Both the accountants and the engineers are formally contracted trainees, who are expected to take professional qualifications involving assessments and/or examinations, as well as engage in learning on-the-job. Hence engagement in off-the-job learning activities is an integral part of their work; and it is appropriate to use the same four structuring dimensions for both types of learning context. These are:

1. The nature, range and structure of work activities
2. The distribution of work activities between people and over time and space
3. The structures and patterns of social relations in the workplace
4. The outcomes of work and learning, their evaluation and the attribution of credit/praise or blame.
   

Key variables affecting the extent to which the activity structure requires, facilitates or inhibits learning in the workplace include:

 the range and variety of activities making up a person’s job, both during a specified
period and over time

• the extent to which activities involve transactions with co-workers, clients/customers, suppliers or other outside people
• the extent to which activities allow flexible decisions to be made at the discretion of individual workers or their immediate managers, rather than being totally programmed
• the scope and demand for inventiveness, problem-solving or creativity from individuals or teams
• the extent to which the activity structure encourages or provides time for meta-level activities such as planning, reviewing, strategic thinking, or quality improvement
• the degree to which the activity structure makes it difficult for individuals and/or groups to perform at the level of their competence
• the nature of formal and informal communications within the workplace and across its boundaries
• the congruity between the activity structure, short-term organisational goals and strategic priorities.

We also found that, in spite of the affordances offered by modern communications technology to transcend some of the constraints of time and space, most social relationships and informal exchanges depend on people being together in the same place at the same time. Working relationships and the exchange of information significantly depend on mutual trust and regard, and the development and maintenance of such trust, as well as awareness of and respect for other people’s perspectives and expertise, are greatly facilitated by informal contact. This may arise through co-location of work, incidental encounters, and opportunities for informal exchanges around the edges of meetings, or in social time in or near the workplace (typically over coffee or lunch).

We are particularly interested in the extent to which social relations in the workplace are best described in terms of (a) an ongoing working community in which a small number of trainees or newly qualified staff happen to be present or (b) a learning system in which the business of being a trainee or supporting a trainee plays a prominent role. The advantages of (a) are considerable when the context is that of a community of practitioners for whom mutual learning and the development of practice are natural goals. In such contexts trainees or newly qualified professionals are valued from the outset as contributors to the work of the group, thus confirming their professional identity, whilst also being inducted and socialised into a learning / working community. This type of working community is ideologically attractive, as the flood of citations of Lave and Wenger will testify; but Eraut (2002) has questioned the frequency of its occurrence, citing reports on work contexts where participation is limited, trainee status is low and constructive feedback is conspicuously absent.

Model (b), based on formally organised systems of learning support, appears to give greatest priority to learning, but this may not happen in practice for several reasons. It requires that a learning system be maintained quite separate from ongoing work. This sets up competition for time and attention between learning and working, with trainees being seen as net consumers of time and effort rather than contributors to the work of the group. This may not lead to more learning opportunities becoming available inside the workplace itself. Moreover, the evidence of research to date suggests that social relations in the workplace are largely constructed at the local rather than the organisational level. It is the local manager who has the greatest influence on the level of mutual support; and also, in some contexts, on the allocation of work (Kozlowski & Hults 1987, Rosenholtz 1989, Tracey et al 1995, Eraut et al 1999).

Variations in support for recruits are often attributed to variables such as class, gender and ethnicity. But Fessey (2002) observed that student nurses and newly qualified nurses on a surgical ward were given more opportunities to learn new techniques and procedures if they were perceived as generally willing to do things and help out in a crisis; and the cumulative effect of such differentiation could have a large impact on their overall professional development. While Miller, Ross and Alderton (1998) found that nurses’ stages of acceptance into a clinical team were related to their ability to ask questions and to seek opportunities for learning. Where colleagues under pressure see advantages in developing a novice’s contribution as rapidly as possible, they may perceive supporting their learning as a trade-off for receiving greater help in the future; but this depends on novices not being moved on too quickly for others to reap these benefits. It may also depend on desperately busy professionals being able to manage their time and attention accordingly.

Another important issue is the variable priority given to different outcomes of work and learning. Formal discussion of outcomes is often confined to periodic appraisals, conducted with varying degrees of professionalism. Often appraisers’ lack of reliable information about long-term outcomes gives short-term outcomes more influence than might otherwise be appropriate. Both formally and informally, some outcomes are given greater attention than others, which in turn affects the way in which workers deploy their time and effort. However, problems occur when outcome priorities differ significantly from activity priorities. If the conflict cannot be resolved, the most likely result is profound alienation.

Our framing of the third question, on contextual influences, starts from previous work (Alderton 1999), which identified three interacting factors -- the learners’ confidence, the challenges of their work and the support they received from managers and colleagues in meeting those challenges. These in turn related to self-efficacy, personal qualities, the micro-culture of the workplace and how they were managed.

Data Analysis

In a project whose findings will be based on the longitudinal analysis of large data sets of qualitative data it is necessary to provide reassurance that, among other things, the way the data has been coded is robust. Accordingly we have established an audit trail which documents how our coding scheme has developed (and continues to evolve), and relates to the theorising of learning at work and the factors that affect such learning. This is a brief outline of the trail.

The first stage comprised a series of discussions within the team of the kind of questions to be asked in the early interviews. The discussions rested on previous theoretical and empirical studies, and were led by the two project directors who had recently researched in nursing, health care, engineering and business. (See Eraut et al. 1998 and Miller, Freeman and Ross, 2001). The discussions were minuted and resulted in the generation of a number of sector specific, semi-structured interview schedules. These reflected expectations of what early data should be collected to support a sequence of subsequent visits and interviews.

The schedules were then used in telephone interviews with students as they left their HE courses, and in the first round of visits to their places of work. The interview transcripts provided the basis for the second stage. This took place as data was being gathered, and involved the examination of transcripts sector by sector to identify the key data and main messages. At this stage stress lay on reading each sector on its own terms before making any cross sector comparisons, and on uncoupling the data from the questions that had been used to obtain it. This work required much revisiting and time for team members to digest and interpret the data. An initial set of codes was produced while further discussion of the theoretical implications produced a cluster diagram that illustrated the project’s focus on the interface between an individual new employee and their employing organisation.

At this point we were becoming increasingly concerned about how we would be able to handle nearly 400 transcripts. So we decided to introduce an intermediate stage in our analysis in the form of a “visit report”, which combines field-note evidence with an account that summarises an interview using a mixture of paraphrasing and quotation. Passages from the transcript were only quoted when the exact words were considered important, because of either their detail or their ability to precisely portray an authentic view of an event or issue. Such reports are 5 to 8 pages in length, whereas interview transcripts alone can be between 10 and 30 pages. We would then code the visit reports rather than the transcripts for later comparison and retrieval. The advantages of visit reports are that:

1) They bring together pieces of related evidence from different parts of an interview, thus reducing fragmentation.

2) They are much more readable and user friendly, thus improving the process of respondent verification. Some respondents had clearly felt overwhelmed when asked to validate a lengthy interview transcript in an unfamiliar format, and did not feel very positive about their ability to communicate; whereas accounts made them feel more positive about what they had said. They found them easier to challenge, and were more likely to amplify accounts on request.

3) Creating the accounts itself involves us in a degree of interpretation as responses are brought together, summarised, reordered and partly paraphrased. This is a valuable first step towards understanding and interpreting the interview data. Thus, instead of validating the transcript itself, respondents validate our interpretation of the transcript, which also encompasses the first stage of data analysis. (The original interview and other data are still preserved on file for reference if a respondent were to question the accuracy of an account, or to aid appropriate coding.)

4) Visit reports are more memorable than transcripts, so researchers analysing them will become more familiar with the data and able to synthesise it more easily, using the systematic coding to retrieve data and to support and check their analysis, not to do it for them.

Additional considerations then came into play as the tentative coding scheme was once more subjected to theoretical scrutiny and tested against a sample of accounts from the three sectors. First, there was a need to ensure that the coding scheme would be able to deal with data from second round and subsequent visits and interviews. Second, it was necessary to finds ways of including observational and contextual data. Finally, there was a fresh return to the project’s original research questions to ensure they would not be overlooked.

An important reason for documenting this audit trail is the project’s whole approach to data coding. We occupy a position that is not quite that of modern, ‘grounded theory’ and its approaches to data coding. Nor have we attempted to code on the basis of a pre-existing theoretical stance. We are somewhere between, probably closer to the first. Neither our interviewing nor our coding have been tied to our original theoretical analysis; but we have been careful not to omit collecting data that our theory would predict to be important. We do not believe this will weaken our warrant, because we will use more than one reader to check the process of moving from “transcript, to visit report, to coding”, for a sample of each set of transcripts.