Investing in worker learning: the role of a manager as a learning facilitator

1. Investing in worker learning: the role of a manager as a learning facilitator AVETRA Conference Canberra, ACT Rosalind Carter, University of Technology, Sydney

2. Context

3. Current context - responsibilities • ‘Provide opportunities for multi-skilling and improved customer service’ • ‘Lead, manage, motivate and develop the capability of staff…’

4. Theoretical framework • Situated learning • HRD and CPD • Organisational learning

5. method • Case study • Semi-structured interviews • Documents • Interpretive perspective

6. Findings • Manager strategies • ‘(...what I do is)…certainly to be very clear about the goals that the team should be working on, the time frames…you have to recognise the different groups you will be dealing with and the combination of personalities and skills within each of those groups … how do they interrelate with other staff and then also with students and customers and ……how much impact and skills and experiences and personalities have on the work that has to be done and the business itself. • Whenever I go into a situation as a supervisor or manager I spend quite a bit of time getting to understand and see the personalities in the different teams and identifying where their strengths are and looking at the capabilities of the staff’. Belinda

7. ‘…it’s about creating an environment where those communities can form and I think it’s about knowing the people’. Chris • ‘...my focus this year has been to getting those edges back together again…focusing on what it is that we are here to support and do and find how we might do that. I think over all my focus is to embed the college in the district’. Chris

8. Manager skills • ‘I think it’s the skill of learning itself…it’s learning how to learn and learning how to apply the training that you had in a different environment and different age… and how to adapt and extrapolate and build bridges from what they all know into this unknown (new work environment) and bring everyone across those bridges together’. Chris • ‘...I think it’s about knowing your staff...’

9. Difficulties • '... when I look at all our support staff, the ever increasing changes in staff and everything, there are so many things that come out and I just look at it for this college and think I can’t do it...’. Olivia • '...part of it is that I don’t get any mentoring either....it isn’t modelled from further up the tree'. Chris • ‘managers don’t necessarily need much training; they can learn most things by themselves’. Mark

10. Why is it difficult • Process is not easily definable • often ad-hoc and reactive, • largely unsystematic and unstructured • Outcomes are difficult to identify • a relatively unrecognised as a concept , a process and an action

11. Ways forward • Confirmed an emerging importance in literature • Context is critical • high priority to manage the social context • Understanding the level of acknowledgement of the role and the reasons why. • Improve support for the role • Reconceptualise the role