Conference Agenda

Times of global change and increasing diversity are associated with transitions that individuals encounter when first engaging in and then continuing to participate in working life. Understanding, elaborating and responding productively to these transitions is salient for at least three reasons. These are the conceptual importance, their methodological adroitness and procedural worth.
Conceptually, most explanatory accounts of human learning and development across the life course acknowledge transitions variously explained through maturation, societal roles, moral and/or cognitive development. The stages of development associated with paid work and participation in it is no exception and is central to adulthood and adults. Much of working age adults’ sense of self, social purpose and engagement with community is premised upon employability, for instance. This process commences with transitions to working life, often for young adults identifying and preparing for specific occupations and then continuing across working life associated with a personal project of employability. That employability is sustaining employment, advancing or broadening occupational engagement or seeking new lines of employment. However, despite its importance as a stage of ontogenetic or lifespan development, explanatory accounts of transitions across working life remain an area requiring more empirically informed and conceptual inclusive accounts, to do justice to the diverse learning and development for working age adults that it comprises.
Methodologically, these transitions offer bases by which that learning and development can be illuminated and elaborated. Whilst learning arises constantly through lived experiences, it is perhaps most intentionally enacted in and through goal-directed activities such when transitions are negotiated. Hence while incremental learning and development remains difficult to capture, those moments of transitions provide experiences that can be captured more readily and provide data that are grounded in those events. Hence, these transitions offer the prospect of securing insights into that learning and development. This can be because these events are often salient to the individual, memorable and reportable, and provide instantiations of how the individual engages with others, institutions, aspects of materiality in negotiating those transitions. In this way, these transitions provide access to insights and explanations that might not otherwise be accessible.
Procedurally, transitions provide insights into how best both younger and working age adults’ learning and development can be guided and supported against the backdrop of increased recognition of diversity. Such insights can be used to identify, trial and validate the range of educative experiences in educational, workplace and community settings that can support these worklife transitions – whether it is about sustaining their current employment, advancing further their capacities in that field or advancing a different and new occupational or career trajectory.
These premises are elaborated through presentations and discussion of empirical research derived from distinct conceptual orientations, from diverse national and cultural situations and stages in adult development: The contributions explore the perilous transitions of young adults from vocational education to working life (1), the different types of learning and changes adults negotiate across worklife transitions (2), career changes in the context of sustainability along with the associated transformative learning experiences (3), and migrants’ learning as they confront labour market barriers (4). The shared concern and goal of these four presentations is to engage diverse perspectives in order to deepen our understanding of transitions to and through working lives.

This paper discusses Finnish vocational upper secondary students’ and graduates’ perceptions and experiences on working life transition(s) in the context of changed adulthood and labour market. It is interested in the changed demands of the labour market that make young adults’ working life transitions more complex than before: scholars (e.g., Sennett 1998; Beck 1992) have claimed that the contemporary market-driven labour market has transformed to be more uncertain, increasingly demanding self-reflexivity, flexibility, responsibility, and efficiency especially from young adults who are starting their working life paths (Kelly 2006). Youth researchers have pointed out how young adults struggle with the expectations of education and employment policies because these policies rely on a very narrow ideal of working life transitions at the same time, when the promises of their education do not meet with the realities of labour market and adulthood they face after graduation (Wyn et al. 2020). In this context, vocational upper secondary education’s aim to improve young people’s employability skills and to educate future worker-citizens is particularly interesting, especially if vocational students learn during their education to interpret their value in society through worker-citizenship (Isopahkala et al. 2014; cf. Farrugia 2021). This paper will discuss with two qualitative datasets, how young adults studying in vocational education (12 group interviews) or who have graduated from vocational education (interviews with 21 young adults) perceive worker-citizenship and how they negotiate with worker-citizen ideal, maintained by vocational education, within the contemporary Finnish labour market (see Author 2021, 2023). The paper will illustrate the importance of worker-citizenship for these young adults as a position that improves their sense of belonging to the work community and society and enables them the adult and independent life they aspire for. However, it will also illustrate how, in line with claims in youth research, some of them struggle when their aspirations, life situations, work experiences and actual chances to do work-related choices do not fit with the worker-citizen ideal. From these perspectives, it ponders vocational education’s worker-citizen ideal in relation to the possibilities of these young adults to feel valuable in society and to make choices that support their life situations and well-being in the contemporary labour market from the perspective of Nussbaum’s (2013) ‘human dignity’. It will show how shaping worker-citizenship is inherent part of vocational graduates’ contemporary adulthood and points out vocational education’s role in supporting these young adults’ senses of societal belonging (see May 2011).

Beck, U (1992) Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity. London: SAGE Publications. Farrugia, D (2021) Youth, Work and the Post-Fordist Self. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Isopahkala-Bouret, U et al. (2014) Educating worker-citizens: visions and divisions in curriculum texts. Journal of education and work 27(1), 92–109. Kelly, P (2006) The entrepreneurial self and ‘youth at-risk’: exploring the horizons of identity in the twenty-first century. Journal of Youth Studies 9(1), 17–32. May, V (2011) Self, Belonging and Social Change. Sociology 45(3), 363–378. Nussbaum, M (2013) Creating Capabilities. The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Sennett, R (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Wyn, J et al. (2020, eds.) Youth and the New Adulthood: Generations of Change. Singapore: Springer Singapore Pty. Ltd.

Migratory transitions are periods of uncertainty with learning opportunities and demands. One challenge facing adult migrants is the recognition of prior training and work experience. However, even when recognition of prior learning succeeds, challenges to labour market access remain through exclusionary practices. Drawing on empirical research conducted in Canada, this paper explores the requirement to possess Canadian Experience (CE) as one such challenge: How do people deal with the oblique and circular challenge of possessing CE to find work in Canada? Newcomers are expected to possess CE to gain full labour market access. It represents a canon of tacit knowledge to be acquired (Sakamoto et al. 2010). Whereas the exclusionary effects of CE have been well-documented, less is known about how individuals learn to engage with CE. This paper thus aims to elucidate this aspect of learning during transitions into new work contexts and to draw conclusions for policy and practice. To study learning during life course transitions, I adopt a doing transitions framework which asserts “that transitions do not simply exist but are constantly constituted by practices” (Walther et al. 2020:5). Accordingly, I draw on a doing migration perspective which views migration as the result of social practices that “turn mobile (and often also immobile) individuals into ‘migrants’” (Amelina, 2020). Against this conceptual backdrop, I conducted biographical-narrative interviews with 20 adults who moved to Canada as ‘skilled migrants.’ Aimed to investigate how individuals learn during migration, the data have been analyzed within a grounded theory framework using the documentary method (Bohnsack, 2014). I identified three modes of engaging with CE: Replay and readjust is marked by repeated setbacks, frustrations, and – seemingly – resignation. Reset and move forward is marked by a lowering of aspirations and an alignment of future life course decisions with the need to acquire CE. Research and pro-act is characterized by excelling at knowing the rules and playing the game. The analysis of the engagement with challenges point to different approaches to learning and its social embeddedness. These findings have relevance for theorizing learning and build on considerations about subjective learning theories (Säljö, 2021).

Amelina, A. (2020). After the reflexive turn in migration studies: Towards the doing migration approach. Population, Space and Place, 27(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2368 Bohnsack, R. (2014). Documentary method. In U. Flick (Ed.), SAGE knowledge. The SAGE handbook of qualitative data analysis (pp. 217–233). SAGE. Sakamoto, I., Chin, M., & Young, M. (2010). “Canadian Experience,” Employment Challenges, and Skilled Immigrants: A Close Look Through “Tacit Knowledge”. Canadian Social Work Journal, 12(1), 145–151. Säljö, R. (2021). The conceptualization of learning in learning research: From introspectionism and conditioned reflexes to meaning-making and performativity in situated practices. In G. R. Kress, S. Selander, R. Säljö, & C. Wulf (Eds.), Foundations and futures of education. Learning as social practice: Beyond education as an individual enterprise (146-168). Routledge. Walther, A., Stauber, B., & Settersten, R. A. (2022). "Doing Transitions": A new research perspective. In B. Stauber, A. Walther, & R. A. Settersten (Eds.), Life course research and social policies. Doing transitions in the life course: Processes and practices (pp. 3–18).

In the past decade, Sustainable development (SD) has taken much importance in the life of (western middle class) individuals. Sustainability for some has become personal; something to justify changing practices of everyday life, one’s diet, consumption or mobility. This contribution though argues that applying SD in a work-related context, handling it as something professional includes additional complexity. Indeed, making sustainability a priority in one’s working life comes with much (re)negotiations about one’s initial vocation and related competencies, one’s professional ambitions and one’s understanding and relationship to work in general. This paper will present results of an investigation interested in the diverse ways of learning, understanding, and implementing sustainability in one’s professional activity. The empirical research is based on semi-directed interviews with individuals in western Europe as they prepared, were in the middle of, or had conducted a professional transition in the context of SD. Career transitions are favorable life course phases for rethinking and reshuffling life priorities (Ebaugh, 1988), for learning to (re)adjust, (re)position, (re)assess oneself with regards to the constantly evolving job market. These individuals are drawn to deliver a personal story about how and/or when to make sustainability something important in their lives, how this change manifested and how it is turned into a professional project. They all seem to agree about wanting a more sustainable society, but the ideal destination, the way to get there and the things that have to change differ grandly. To counter the highly individualized narratives and seemingly individualized career life projects, this research uses a practice theory approach (Reckwitz, 2002). Through this theoretical lens, human and non-human participants, sayings, doings, artifacts, and affects are equally appreciated (Schatzki et al., 2001) and used to describe practices. The interviews were analyzed using the Documentary Method (Bohnsack, 2010), from which emerged four ways to approach sustainability through work. Three types that range from abandoning a previous profession to practice sustainability in a highly committed way (Exemplary approach), to repurposing competencies of a former profession and make them shine under a new light (Indispensable approach), to juggling between former professional aspirations and new ecological values (Interposition approach). Finally, with Sustainable Development at the heart of this investigation, precise learning experiences embedded at the intersection of work and sustainability emerge that can inform about the way adults are currently navigating and negotiating their professional paths.

Bohnsack, Ralf; Pfaff, Nicolle; Weller, Wivian (Hg.) (2010): Qualitative analysis and documentary method in international educational research. Opladen: Budrich. Ebaugh, H. R. F. (1988). Becoming an ex: The process of role exit. University of Chicago Press. Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. European journal of social theory, 5(2), 243-263. Schatzki, Theodore; Knorr-Cetina, Karin; Savigny, Eike von (Hg.) (2001): The practice turn in contemporary theory. New York: Routledge.

The transitions adults negotiate across their working lives as they secure, maintain and develop further employability through their learning are of interest to governments, workplaces, and workers themselves. Governments and their supra-governmental counterparts are concerned about working age adults respond to changing work and occupational requirements to sustain their employability across lengthening working lives (OECD, 2006). Through analyses of worklife history interview data with 30 working age adults, distinct kinds of changes comprising these transitions have been delineated as representative of changes that have person-particular meanings and impacts. This delineation represents understandings of processes and outcomes for adults’ learning and development. These transitions have specific kinds of scope, duration, and impacts in terms of continuity/discontinuity with individuals’ earlier activities and knowing. Transitions can be observed, captured, and represented by a complex of personal, institutional, and/or brute factors. Understanding the changes comprising these worklife transitions and how they can be supported and facilitated requires accounting for societal factors as well as individuals’ personal histories and legacies and impacts of maturation These transitions were identified as being of six kinds: i) life stages, ii) employment status, iii) occupations, iv) relocations, v) health, and vi) personal preference or trajectories (Author et al 2021). The changes can be seen as being a product of societal factors (i.e., institutional facts) or those arising through nature (i.e., brute facts) (Searle, 1995). Amongst these are those that arise through individuals’ personal histories or ontogenies, referred to as personal facts (Author, 2009). Moreover, learning for and through these transitions were of five kinds and about: i) language and literacy; ii) cultural practices; iii) world of work; iv) occupational skills; and v) worklife engagement. These findings suggests explaining the processes of learning that support sustained employability in times of change and uncertainty need to account for the complex of factors comprising what is suggested by the social world (i.e., the social suggestion - e.g., opportunities, barriers, invitations, , close-distance support, et cetera) and how individuals engage with and shaped by their subjectivities (i.e., sense of self, relations to others), capacities (i.e., what they know, can do, and value), and personal epistemologies (i.e., how they make sense of the world and respond to it). Such findings point to a broader range of educative experiences than those privileged in lifelong educational provisions and the importance as viewing curriculum as being a personal, rather than institutional pathway.

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