Eliciting Professional Practical Knowledge:

Experiences And Problems

Judith Furner and Stephen Steadman

Sussex University School of Education

This paper was the basis of a presentation to the Learning in the Professions Session, 16th September of the

BERA Annual Conference, UMIST, Manchester, 2004.

Early Career Learning at Work (LiNEA) Project

Research funded by

The TLRP Programme of the UK Economic and Social Research Council

Introduction

The TLRP funded Early Career Learning at Work (LiNEA) Project is a longitudinal study of the learning of groups of newly qualified nurses, engineers and accountants during their first three years of employment. An earlier paper (Steadman et al. 2002) gave a broad description of the project’s working methods, told of initial problems and indicated some tentative emergent findings. Since then the project has produced three Interim Reports, one for each sector, on its findings from the first round of visits and interviews (Eraut and Furner 2004; Maillardet, Ali and Steadman 2004; Miller and Blackman 2004). A series of other papers have followed developments in the project team’s theoretical perspectives (Eraut, M. et al. 2002, 2003a & b & 2004).

Evidence from later events has been taken into account in this paper which examines the team’s practical experiences and associated problems in relation to some of the methodological issues that arise when trying to elicit the informal and often tacit knowledge used by professionals in their work.

The selected themes in this paper are:

Observations – intentions versus reality;

Timing, work scheduling and monitoring;

Relationships – their formation and maintenance;

Data handling, coding and analysis.

General features of the research design

The project’s methodology addresses the problems of accessing hard information on what people need to know at work when most learning at work is informal and therefore unlikely to be readily acknowledged or even remembered without some pertinent prompting. Previous research has shown that important components of what is learnt are often carried as tacit knowledge and skills which are drawn on in working situations to address problems without the user being conscious of their utility. Even formal learning on courses or in workshops, which is readily recognised as learning, may be forgotten after a while. The project is therefore combining visits, observation and interviews (with managers and mentors as well as the new employees themselves) over three years to gather its data. The key importance of observation is revisited below.

The main sample comprises 16 trainee accountants, 34 graduate trainee engineers and 40 newly qualified nurses. The accountants and engineers are formally contracted trainees, for whom employers have developed systems of organised training support. The engineers start with relevant degrees, e.g. in engineering or computer science, but the accountants’ degrees are rarely in relevant subjects so they start with only those learning and thinking skills acquired at university that are not sector generic. The data set comprises field notes on observations in the workplace, transcripts of interviews with learners and interviews with their managers and/or mentors. We are at the stage of the fourth and final visits in a three year longitudinal study. The interviews with learners go beyond the usual exploration of participants’ experiences and feelings to explore three questions as precisely as possible:

What is being learned?

How is it being learned?

What are the main factors affecting this learning in the workplace?

This framework was originally developed for a previous project on mid-career learning in the workplace (Eraut et al. 1998a and 1998b, and 2000), but has been enhanced for this research by the addition of a period of one to two days observation prior to the interview. In addition to the evidence of the field-notes, the observations enabled us to use workplace documents and activities as starting points for conversations about embedded knowledge and its acquisition that would otherwise have been impossible.

Observations – intentions versus reality

The place of observation in the research design is of key importance because of the known problems in accessing informal and tacit knowledge.

  • only knowledge acquired in formal educational/training settings is easily brought to mind, articulated and discussed;
  • tacit, personal knowledge and the skills essential for performance at work tend to be taken for granted and omitted from accounts;
  • often the most important workplace tasks and problems require an integrated use of several different kinds of knowledge, and the integration of the components is itself a tacit process.

The visits as planned in the project proposal, were supposed to take the following form. Day one, go along for an extended period of observation, stay out of the way and keep quiet, except at breaks and lunch time, but talk to the managers and mentors as you get the chance to do so. The next morning continue observing, and in the afternoon do the interview with the advantages of being able to refer to observed incidents and processes where the informant has either been learning or appears to have drawn on previously learnt knowledge, skills or understandings.

Trying to observe and interview busy nurses on shifts, accountants on client’s premises and engineers on site brings practical problems. Nevertheless, observation brings many advantages. Some examples are that observation:

educates the observer/interviewer about the working context, necessary tasks and priorities, and thus enriches subsequent data gathering;

provides ‘clues’ to the use of knowledge that must have been previously learnt.;

allows complexity to be appreciated;

enables comparisons that suggest questions; and

discourages the painting of ‘ideal pictures’ by informants when they know reality has been observed;

A main advantage is that, with observation as a starting point, an interview becomes a discourse of description, rather than a discourse of justification that can so easily result from asking what an informant has had to learn in order to do the job. However, while many benefits accrue from combining observation and interview data, the meaning of the data is not always explicit. What should an observer infer from seeing a trainee accountant walk round an organisation, following the path of an invoice through the stages of its handling?

The hand-over on a hospital ward to a new shift team is one instance where a rich mix of information has to be handled. The new team has to know about patients, their conditions, treatments given and their effects, necessary monitoring and possible changes, links to doctors, relatives and other agencies as patients are to be moved or discharged, and so on. Ephemeral documentation is used as both a reminder for the hand-over, and a reference point for those being briefed. A hand-over may take up to an hour. No wonder then that newly qualified nurses find these events full of calls on their ability to learn – and learn quickly if their credibility with colleagues is not to suffer. It is not simply the need to understand the medical content of what is being relayed, often embedded in a stream of acronyms and abbreviated terms – the working jargon of a professional: important implications have to be appreciated and priorities for attention decided. They also have to learn – through their own observations and judgements – how best to conduct a hand-over when it is their turn to do so. The newly qualified find these events stressful, and observing such events helps a researcher to understand why.

The next two examples illustrate something of the range of situations observed with engineers.

Example 1.

Recently I was with a civil engineer, working on an upgrading of water main systems. On the first day she insisted that I accompany her to a meeting of the agents who are responsible for digging up the pipes and for the work of renewing or replacing them. She then took me to two places where this was going on, to show me what the pipes look like and what can be done to the insides of these pipes to keep them in use before the most expensive option of excavation and complete replacement has to be faced. Without that observation I would have been unable later on, during the visit, to fully understand what she was telling me about, let alone anything else, even before I could begin opening up the areas of learning that she’s been engaged in.

Example 2.

I was observing a mechanical engineer who was working at her desk while sitting, because of restricted space, with my shoulder jammed up against her small bookcase. After a while I spotted a manual on a particular software programme which I’d never heard of before. So I asked her about it, not in the formal interview, but at another time of the day. She said, ‘Oh yes, that’s something I’m working on.’ And when we got to the interview itself, it turned out that she had been picked by senior people in the firm to find out how that piece of software could be used to forecast risk assessments and allied costs. The senior management had picked on her because, in their eyes, a young graduate was expected to be well up in IT skills.

In total these examples show how observation educates the observer/interviewer, prompts them to suspect the deployment of previously acquired knowledge, skills or understandings, provides ‘clues’ to things learnt, and reveals learning opportunities that a trainee may fail to mention. In relation to Example 1, the graduate engineer had herself found it essential to make the same field visits in order to understand the implications on the ground with the work gangs of what she was responsible for planning back in the office.

Observation thus enriches subsequent data gathering. Many other examples could equally be given to illustrate the kinds of interactions and opportunities that have proved the wisdom of having observations as an integral part of the research methodology. But, as noted above, observation often runs into practical problems that have to be negotiated. In the nursing sector our researchers have found that shift patterns determine how long observations can last. So, although we intended to have a day and a half spent observing before an interview, the natural period of observation is often not that. In these circumstances we have to go with the flow, and rightly so. We are also finding that nurses are so busy, that finding the time to do the interview is a problem in itself. In fact they are so busy that, by the end of their shift, they’ve often forgotten what they were doing at the start of the shift. This is a problem which previous researchers have noted. Being able to refresh a nurse’s memory from the observer’s field notes, or by other means such as the digital photographs that Christine Fessey (2002a, b and c) used in her very rigorous work, is absolutely necessary when this happens.

In the other two sectors rather different problems arise with observations. Trainee accountants can spend significant parts of their working lives on the premises of clients. Although this could have raised significant problems, in practice, by allowing the accountants to negotiate access on our behalf, this has not proved to be the case. Most clients have accepted that it is the trainees who are being observed, not themselves, and we have been careful in our positioning and other actions and conversations on site to make it clear that this is the case.

Nowadays many engineers and accountants, spend prolonged periods in front of computer screens, much more time than we had ever expected when planning this research. So an observation period of up to six hours could be spent looking at the back of someone’s head. Viewing a computer screen from further than three feet away is itself a challenge. So we negotiate with the trainee and manager what goes on in those circumstances and, if it’s not profitable to prolong an observational period, we negotiate it down, or we rearrange how we spend our time. In all sectors, being an observer brings problems of where one should place oneself to be able to see, yet be out of the way and definitely not in the line of sight of the person being observed. This has proved awkward at times but we have not, up to now, found this an insuperable problem.

Observation of an individual over many hours has many of the characteristics of ‘shadowing’ and there is the danger of becoming an oppressive presence. Presumably, this was felt by one trainee accountant who was sufficiently disconcerted by the first period of observation to wish to drop out of the project. However, subsequent negotiations with the trainee, and their training manager, found a compromise. The trainee agreed to be interviewed on each round of field visits, but not observed. Clearly, we agreed to this arrangement because we did not wish to lose all the data from this individual, and we hoped the decision would eventually be reversed when the trainee could see how the project was progressing. But we also agreed because we were still able to observe the other trainee accountants and use insights from that set of data when interviewing the one person who objects to being observed. Thus the arrangement does not completely undermine our position on the importance of using data from both observations and interviews.

Very few others among our 90 trainees have shown signs of this being a problem, although we have found that, as nurses move into more senior positions, they are less happy about being observed and less happy about taking time out for an interview, even when the time requested is only 30 minutes. Oddly enough, in one firm, it was someone totally unconnected with the project, and to this day not known to us, who found the presence of our observer unsettling and complained to the management. They quickly resolved the issue by explaining fully what was going on. However, particularly when trainees are working with computers, but generally too, we have found it helps to use tea and coffee and other breaks to raise some of the things we think we may have noticed. This keeps us on track, makes sure we understand what the trainee is working on, and gives opportunities for more general conversation that often identifies topics worth following up in the formal interview.

In practice, it is not turning out to matter very much if the two days of a visit are not consecutive. We are still able to pick up on enough of what is going on. And the visits are not always two days in length because of the patterns of shift work or the time taken in travelling between a work site and the office. The key consideration seems to be, whether enough of the action is observed to provide enough material for meaningful interactions with the trainee and their managers. Does the observer see enough of the trainee’s working life to provide an understanding of their present workload, and the knowledge and skills it requires, so that an interview can become enriched by reference to the shared reality.

Timing, work scheduling and monitoring

Time on a project is invaluable. Timing matters too, but it is not always within one’s control. In the summer of 1999 this project was approved by the ESRC with a starting date of January 2000. We were informed of this in the summer, but the associated contract did not arrive until the turn of the year. Without a firm contract we were unable to advertise for the three research fellows we required, let alone appoint them. It took three months, in one case longer because of the need to re-advertise, to bring the research fellows into the project.

This delay had many knock on consequences. For example, in the nursing sector we had to submit our intentions to various ethics committees to gain approval for our research. Until we had named researchers we could not submit our proposals, and we had committees to negotiate at both regional and trust level. We were relatively fortunate in that the additional information we were asked to supply for consideration did not lead to further delays, but the process is not streamlined and there is no hierarchy whereby approval at some ‘senior’ level will clear the path at other levels. Every ethics committee keeps its own gate. It is worth noting that the procedures for gaining approval from ethics committees have become even more onerous since the year 2000.

In accountancy the knock on effects had other consequences. During the planning of the project we had been in negotiation with potential partners in each of the three sectors. In this respect the delay between approval and an actual start to the project affected the accountancy sector the most. Some of the potential partners we had identified proved extremely slow to allow us the entry and access that we thought we had already agreed. What appears to have happened is that the delay meant that personnel and/or responsibilities had changed, and the project thus lost momentum and priority within some firms. It is understandable that, because much accountancy work is carried out on the premises of the firm’s clients, potential partners in the research needed to be convinced that our presence would not compromise relations between the firm and its clients. In many cases we had to restart negotiations almost from scratch.