Symposium on Early Career Professional Learning

Symposium on Early Career Professional Learning

AERA Conference, Montreal, April 15th 2005

Presented by the

Early Career Learning at Work (LiNEA) Project Team

Professor M. Eraut, S. Steadman, J.Furner

(University of Sussex)

Professor F. Maillardet, Professor C. Miller, Dr A. Ali, C. Blackman C.Caballero (University of Brighton)

Challenging Work

Presented by

Fred Maillardet

University of Brighton Faculty of Science and Engineering

This research was funded by

The Teaching and Learning Research Programme

of the

UK Economic and Social Research Council

Challenging Work

Fred Maillardet: University of Brighton, Faculty of Science and Engineering

Theoretical Models.

The first paper in this symposium (Steadman et al 2005) presented two theoretical models developed within our project to structure our findings on what is learned in the professional workplace and how it is learned. The third theoretical model, which featured strongly in our paper for last year’s AERA conference at San Diego, concerned factors that facilitate or hinder work-based learning. This “two triangle model”, depicted below, separates immediate learning factors from the context factors that give rise to them. We have found all three models very useful for comparing learning across professions, and even for depicting key features of any workplace environment. They are now beginning to be used in other professions, as opportunities arise.

One prominent finding of our earlier research on mid-career learning was the overwhelming importance of confidence. Much learning at work occurs through doing things and being proactive in seeking learning opportunities, and this requires confidence. Moreover, we noted that confidence arose from successfully meeting challenges in one’s work, while the confidence to take on such challenges depended on the extent to which learners felt supported in that endeavour. Thus there is a triangular relationship between challenge, support and confidence (Eraut et al. 2000). The contextual significance of the word “confidence”, which was used by our respondents without further elaboration, depended on which aspects of this triangular relationship were most significant for particular people at particular points in their careers. The dominant meaning for most mid-career respondents usually came close to Bandura’s (1995) concept of self-efficacy. This is a context-specific concept, relating to the ability to execute a particular task or successfully perform a role. It is not a general attribute like “self-esteem”. For some mid-career respondents, however, confidence related more to relationships than to the work itself. Did they feel confident about the support of their working colleagues, in more senior, more junior or parallel jobs? This depends on whether they perceived their more significant working relationships as mutually supportive, generally critical, faction-ridden or even overtly hostile. For early career professionals, this latter aspect of confidence was more prominent.

Challenge and value Feedback and support

of the work

Confidence and commitment

We have now added a further element to each apex of this triangle to reflect other factors found to be significant for the learning of early career professionals. These are:

• feedback because of its huge importance at this career stage,
• the value of the work (both for clients and to the individual) as an additional motivating factor and
• commitment to learning, which together with confidence affects the extent to which early career professionals are proactive in taking advantage of the learning opportunities available to them.

Our evidence from this project confirms that both confidence in one’s ability to do the work and commitment to the importance of that work are primary factors that affect individual learning. Confidence depends on the successful completion of challenging work, and that in turn may depend on informal support from colleagues, either while doing the job or as back up when working independently. Indeed the willingness to attempt challenging tasks on one’s own depends on such confidence. If there is a lack of challenge, or insufficient support to encourage a trainee to seek out or respond to a challenge, then confidence declines and with it the motivation to learn. Commitment is generated through social inclusion in teams and by appreciating the value of the work for clients and for themselves as novice professionals. Moreover, concerns about career progress that arise from inadequatefeedback of a normative kind can weaken motivation and reduce commitment to the organisation.

The inclusion of observation in this study has enabled us to give greater attention to the nature of participants’ work and their relationships at work; and this has led to the extension of our model to include a second triangle. This mirrors the first triangle but focuses on contextual variables that influence the learning factors depicted in the first triangle.

Allocation and structuring Encounters and relationships

of work with people at work

Individual participation and

expectations of their

performance and progress

The allocation and structuring of work was central to our participants’ progress, because it affected the:

1) difficulty or challenge of the work,

2)extent to which it was individual or collaborative, and

3)opportunities for meeting, observing and working alongside people who had more or different expertise, and for forming relationships that might provide feedback and support.

For novice professionals to make good progress, a significant proportion of their work needs to be sufficiently new to challenge them without being so daunting as to reduce their confidence. And their workload needs to be at a level that allows them to reflectively respond to new challenges, rather than develop coping mechanisms that might later prove to be ineffective. Novices are more efficient on tasks where they already have enough experience, but also need to be involved in a wider range of tasks in order to extend their experience. Thus managers and/or senior colleagues have to balance the immediate demands of the job against the needs of the trainees as best they can, as well as satisfying the requirements of professional bodies and/or health and safety.

We found that decisions affecting the structuring and allocation of work may be determined by any combination of the following factors:

1)The nature of the work, the way in which the organization handles it and the discretion given to local managers in decisions of this kind. In all three of our professions local managers had significant opportunities to facilitate learning through their allocation of work and support of novice workers.

2)The quantity and urgency of the work in hand at the time. This was a major issue in hospitals where work overload almost overwhelmed novice nurses, while at the same time it reduced the amount of support they could get from more experienced colleagues. It was sometimes important in engineering, if a company was undergoing a fallow period that limited the supply of challenging assignments.

3)Periodic decisions made by managers in which learning needs may or may not have been considered. This was relevant when allocating novices to audit teams, nursing shifts or medium term engineering tasks.

4)Decisions made by more experienced colleagues with delegated authority, who are currently working with the novice, and probably best able to judge the appropriate level of challenge if they think that it is important.

Whether these decisions benefit the learning of the novice professional will depend on the disposition, imagination, competence (in making these kinds of decisions) and available thinking time of those who make the decisions.

Our San Diego paper (Eraut et al 2004) used the findings of the first year of our three year longitudinal study to explain how the Two Triangle Model could be used:

a)to compare and contrast our three professional groups and different

contexts within those groups, and

b)to analyse the interactions between the six types of factor, depicted by the apexes of the triangles, within each individual participant’s workplace.

It gave particular attention to how support and feedback were provided by “helpful others” in the workplace, both formally and, more usually, informally, because this group of factors was especially influential during the first year of employment.

This paper focuses on the challenge and value of the work allocated to our participants in their second and third years of practice and the contextual factors that appear to determine this dimension of the novice professional’s experience. For the accountants and engineers, the challenge and value of their work had become the most important factors affecting their learning and their morale. This was also true for some of the nurses.

Ideally, a progressive programme of work providing a gradually increasing level of challenge is required throughout the training period. This has been found to exist in some cases in all the three sectors studied, but it is far from being the norm. The reasons why it can be so difficult to establish and maintain the right level of challenge will now be explored.

The engineering situation.

There appears to be a significant lack of challenge for some graduate engineers in the engineering sector.

“I’m not particularly happy because, as I said, sometimes I feel like I’m under-utilised. I had hoped for a few more challenges…Yes, I would have preferred this job to be a bit more challenging.”

Why is this? It could be due to a lack of suitable projects. This could be due to:

a)increasing commercial pressures across the whole company to sanction only ‘real’ projects – i.e. those which contribute directly to the work in hand and need to be carried out; or

b)increasing budgetary pressure on local Line Managers to avoid strictly non-productive tasks; or

c)the inappropriate scale and/or complexity of the current range of projects;

“I’ve been on this project for three years and I don’t think that what I’m doing now is particularly different from what I was doing three years ago.”

d)the company is only assembling or interfacing sub-components or sub-systems.

“…but there are still a lot of sub-contract things going out that you think well, we could do that in-house because we have the knowledge and we’re giving it away to company X. I find it frustrating – and I won’t mention that some sub-systems haven’t exactly been performing to specification either!”

It could be due to nobody being charged with the specific responsibility of identifying suitable projects. While the Line Manager may judge that the graduate engineer has the time available and the ability to carry out a task, he/she may not consider whether it is appropriately challenging. This could be an unintentional outcome of the ‘ask anyone’ situation, which can lead to a lack of sufficiently focused developmental planning.

“I didn’t see him [the mentor] as often as I should because, basically, we’re both busy people really…”

Training Managers do not always ensure that suitable projects are being given to the graduate engineer. This could be because:

a)the Training Manager has insufficient influence within the organisation to change working practice; or

b)the company policy deliberately prevents intervention from the centre. (The cultivation of a ‘village culture’ in all operating units has been found to be a deliberate policy in one large company.)

It is, however, interesting that the possibility of ‘over-qualified’ graduates being employed has not been raised at all, either by managers in the companies concerned or by any of the graduate engineers involved in this study.

The graduate engineers own perceptions.

While engagement in relatively low level work (e.g. routine calculations, routine layout drawings, checking circuit diagrams, etc) is anticipated in the early days of employment, many graduate engineers expect to move onto conceptual design work relatively quickly. However, a number complain after three years that they have still to ‘escape’ from low level activity.

“I’d like to have different work. I’d like to do some design…it would be nice to sort of start from the ground up on a project and go through the whole thing just for the experience, but I know that’s fairly unlikely to happen at the moment.”

Have their expectations been raised excessively at university, or during their contact with industry on work experience/sandwich placements?

Some graduate engineers have difficulty seeing how the task in hand fits into the overall project. This lack of explanation and feedback reduces their motivation to the project and thus the perceived challenge.

“It’s not very rewarding as with some of the work, you never see any result.”

Even after three years, many graduate engineers have had only a very cursory exposure to real site or product user experience; relatively brief site visits, laboratory experiments and/or in-company presentations cannot compare with extended site experience or personal engagement with users operating in a real perhaps hostile environment. For example, preliminary analysis shows that the majority of the electrical and electronic engineers in the study had no site experience at all throughout the whole of their three years graduate employment. The relevance or ‘value’ of the work they are engaged upon is thus not always clear to the graduate engineer. This again reduces their motivation to the project and, ultimately, to the job.

“Customer or Service Engineers can tell you a hell of a lot more about the system than I can, because they’ve been out in the field and know how the systems

work…I would have welcomed the opportunity to go on site”

Accountants.

This profession appears to be able to overcome some of the deficiencies apparent in the engineering sector and to offer more appropriate levels of challenge for several reasons. First, the scale of audits ranges from a few days to several months, and greater length usually means greater complexity, and within these audits are many sub-tasks, which also vary in complexity. Hence it is possible with forethought, and even on the job, to allocate work of appropriate complexity. Thus work can be graded in complexity over time relatively easily. Working on the client’s premises enables trainees to engage with a wide range of businesses, and they gradually learn to match a variety of business procedures with their representations in the accounts. In smaller audits senior trainees are usually in charge on the client’s premises, and they can still remember their own progression experiences when allocating work to newer trainees.

“ I’ve started being in charge of smaller jobs, generally ones where there’s, I’d say, two people on the audit team … And obviously … that’s a big change in responsibility to not just have to do your work, but first you’ve got to monitor someone else and make sure they’re doing their work. And then you have to produce all the summary report … and make sure everything’s under control.”

He found his new responsibilities, “more stressful, but it is more interesting.”

Another reason is that auditors frequently return to the same client year after year building up a helpful familiarity with the needs and working practices of the client. It is thus easier to allocate the programme of work to suit the progressive needs of the ‘juniors’ in the team.

“We’ve been with [this client] for the last two years. This year I’m leading one of the accounting areas and in line with that I had a trainee working for me for four or five weeks and I was directly responsible for assigning tasks which is quite a new thing and quite hard work.”

Thirdly, there are opportunities to be in charge of an audit when it is judged that sufficient experience has been gained.

“I’ve been doing the audit of a big newspaper group ... doing the completion of that. And I was the ‘ in-charge’ on completing that work [although] there were a couple of other seniors in charge to start with. They’ve left the department now so I’m doing the completion and… organizing other people trying to get them to complete”.

Fourthly, client contact is assured so that the ‘value’ of the work is usually very clear.

“ It was a fairly high profile client, in terms of its importance to the firm…we only won it last year…and it represented our first real breakthrough into a new client are…We go in during the year to evaluate the client’s systems. And so we’re looking to see have they got appropriate controls imposed to make sure everything’s accounted for properly, and make sure their final figures are going to be a reasonable approximation of what’s actually there.”

However, particularly early on, there can develop a degree of frustration over the lack of in-depth understanding.

“ I found it difficult because I hadn’t actually planned the account area; it was planned by someone who had to leave the office…so I had to step in and it was while I was trying to familiarise myself with the case…and what we were working [on], that sort of thing.”

When such understanding is attained in later years, it can lead to an increase in self-worth and thus confidence and motivation. Thus one senior trainee felt challenged by some, but not all, aspects of her work.

“It varies. The nature of the task [is] often not that challenging, it’s just a case [of] you’re always faced with a new audit perhaps, where you’ve got to get to grips with the client, and ... you need to be on top of the issues with that particular client, that’s quite challenging. And if you’re expected to go into a meeting with the finance director and ... hold your own and know about their organisation that’s definitely challenging.”

Nurses.

The challenges of prioritising from among the many tasks needing attention and the responsibility level to be taken are shared with the other two sectors, but the self-generated pressure to try to meet all the needs of the patient is unique to nursing. Couple this with the great range and depth of opportunity for challenge, and it perhaps explains why the nursing sector appears to be the most demanding to manage. The reasons appear to be as follows: