The role of on-the-job and off-the-job provision in vocational education and training

Abstract

Drawing on Martin Heidegger's notion of being-in-the-world to represent occupational capability as the facility to make sense of a 'world' of occupation-specific meanings and involvements, a perspective which contrasts greatly with more traditional accounts centred on the dichotomies of theory-practice, thinking-doing, and so on. It seems to me that this alternative conception of occupational capability has a number of important implications for the role of work-based learning, and I would be interested in exploring these with a view to determining, amongst other things, what can and cannot be expected from workplace learning. Our getting clear about the substantive benefits of work-based learning, I would argue, necessitates acknowledging its limitations.