Practices and Strategies to Support Worklife Learning: The Australian Context

Globally, there is growing recognition of and action for ongoing learning across individuals’ working lives. This imperative is for them to remain currently competent and employable amidst changing occupational competence and workplace requirements. Added here are expectations that working age adults would need to actively contribute through their learning to national economic well-being and to partially sponsor their ongoing development themselves. Hence, employability has come to comprise four aspects: (a) being employable (i.e., having specific work-related and occupational capacities); (b) sustaining employment (i.e., remaining current and employable); (c) securing advancement (i.e., gaining promotion or becoming more broadly skilled); and (d) transitioning to new/other occupations (i.e., being able to move into new occupations) (Billett S. Promoting graduate employability: key goals, and curriculum and pedagogic practices for higher education. In: Ng Ling B (ed) Graduate employability and workplace-based learning development: Insights from sociocultural perspectives. Springer, Dordrecht, 2022). Together, these four aspects offer bases from which to appraise how the kinds of worklife learning outcomes desired by governments, workplaces and workers can be realised and in ways that are accessible and scalable for the working age population. This chapter presents and discusses the survey data of a project aiming to generate evidence-based policies and informed practices supporting worklife learning arrangements promoting Australian workers’ employability. The analyses of survey data provided by working age adults gauge their perspectives about practices by government, workplaces, educational institutions, workplaces and working age adults themselves to promote worklife learning associated with employability. These findings note that the needs for and preferences about these practices differ across culturally and ethnically defined classifications of those workers, and across their stages of working life. Proposed practices are ranked and this provides some bases to offer recommendations about how governments, workplaces, educational institutions and working age adults might come to promote employability across lengthening working lives.