New workplace, new place ...

Friday 20th March

The workplace experiment continues with confidence gained and lost. Written job instructions should be brief to be effective, but in real life situations it is often the small detail that confounds the learner. Should the learner take the initiative and not be too concerned about some detail, or should time be spent studying detail and asking many time consuming questions of colleagues. Of course this will vary with the workplace. In real life, time is limited, and many organisations expect new employees ‘to hit the ground running’. The new employee does not want to disappoint. Learning happens with every task undertaken, with every small error. For employees with experience it is not a matter of learning skills, it is learning how to reapply those skills in the new workplace. This has to do with the workplace culture as much as the work itself. Competency comes with time is the traditional answer? The information literate adult should be able to reduce workplace learning time; should be flexible in their thinking and able to evaluate what detail is important in the new situation; but there remains a portion of learning that is simply workplace specific. Information literacy skills facilitate the learning process, they do not bypass the trouble of learning!