Workplace learning potential for non-students learners

Workplace learning is intended to be the result of learning that is embedded in day-to-day work. It is anchored in work processes, in project-based or embedded in team working, in job positions, in relations and business procedures. We learn through work tasks, from colleagues and work mentors, from external providers, through trials and errors, by solving challenges, by changing job positions, through continuing training employers can provide. This is because organisations are systems of people and goods aimed at the production of services and the creation of value. Here knowledge lets you know which service to produce, how to produce it, who to distribute it to and how to distribute it. This is what enables any organisation to work. The wealth of knowledge an organisation has is not the sum of the wealth of each individual who is part of it. Not all the knowledge individuals possess has a use value for an organisation and, therefore, not all of it enters or will ever enter to be part of its cognitive system. Organisation itself can be considered a person whose own knowledge is different from the individuals who are part of it. Also for the knowledge, the one possessed by the organisation is different from the one every employee possesses. This means that each of the elements that compose the “containers” of knowledge” (physical capital, organizational structures, routine, individuals, relations) generates learning activities not as an object of teaching, but because it contains knowledge and because the mere fact of entering into a relationship with it generates learning processes through learning actions of a different nature and form. A business, an institution exists as a result of the technological and innovation progress that is produced by its own activity and no longer by external transfer of knowledge that others are producing and creating outside the organisation. This is because innovation and growth come from things people do, also in their daily work through the use of organisations containers. It can be better understood only by adopting interpretative measures different to those of formal education. In this new perspective where production and learning are strictly connected and not separated, growth of organisations, businesses and institutions are deemed as an endogeneous process that is produced by productive agents themselves, differently depending on their roles and position.