Equipping and assessing learners for the ever-changing workplace

The only reasonable assumption we can make about workplaces of the future is that we will not know their focus or their features. However, we can assume that they will be digitally enabled in a variety of ways and that some features of the learning that occurs when people work together will continue. That is, learning will be a social and material activity, centred on the practices of work, much of it informal and not directly generated by training and development events, and that navigating work will be a central concern of all practitioners. The chapter draws on ideas from workplace learning, practice theory and the development of evaluative judgement to consider the learning interfaces between formal education and the world of work. It synthesises earlier work on how workers learn in the messy and unstructured context of work, how the higher education curriculum can address preparation for practices and how learners’ capacities to discern quality and apply evaluative judgement to their own work and that of their peers can be developed. It focuses on the role of assessment and the powerful influence this has on constraining and enabling a shift to recognising the importance of practices in education.