Understanding learning for the professions: How theories of learning explain coping with rapid change

1. Introduction Working life is increasingly in turbulence. Whole traditional professional fields disappear as new ones emerge. Within traditional professions technological and organisational development often means rapid changes in knowledge, skills, and working attitudes required from workers. All of this results in a challenge to develop vocational and professional education, and models of workplace learning that respond to these changes. The central questions are how new generations should be prepared for a future, at least partly unknown, working lives and how old workers should be supported in the necessary updating of their knowledge and skills during their work careers are added challenges. The aim of this chapter is to analyse how adequate the contemporary theories of learning are for dealing with these challenges. Certainly, a great deal of the changes re. quiring gradual or more radical reconsidering of professional practices and competences, takes place within existing professions. New technologies, increasingly complex production methods, marketing and distribution networks, internationalization and globalization change not only influence the work of those professionals in higher positions within work hierarchies, but have an influence throughout the work organizations (Harkin, 1977). Moreover, Globalization, changes in communication technologies, and unexpected consequences of previous and contemporary technologies result in deep reaching changes in society and modify our daily lives. Increasing market competition and companies' attempts to profit from rapidly changing products and reduced production costs also lead to pressures towards innovation and the restructuring of organizations. Many researchers have analysed conditions and processes that cause such radical changes in working life and which result in the emergence of new professional fields (e. Studies such as these have identified several 'change drivers' that require coordinated , often global solutions, e.g., in the fields of environment, finance and security. Indeed, various threats and possibilities, demographic change, economic turbulence, political change, norms, and legislation have resulted in the creation of totally new jobs, or hybridized existing jobs in complex ways. Hybrids, such as personal debt advisors, game addiction therapists or energy efficiency experts can all be institutionalized as a subfield of existing disciplines, or a permanent cross-disciplinary program, or they can remain informal (Klein, 2010). Talwar and Hancock (2010) analysed how new jobs arise as a consequence of opportunities and implications for science and technology, which lead them to present quite exotic examples of future professions (e.g., body part maker, nano-medic, farmer of genetically engineered crops and livestock, social 'networking' analyst). …