Lifelong Learning in Paid and Unpaid Work

Lifelong Learning is essential to all individuals and in recent years has become a guiding principle for policy initiatives, ranging from national economic competition to issues of social cohesion and personal fulfilment. However, despite the importance of lifelong learning there is a critical absence of direct, international evidence on its extent, content and outcomes.Lifelong Learning in Paid and Unpaid Work provides a new paradigm for understanding work and learning, documenting the active contribution of workers to their development and their adaptation to paid and unpaid work. Empirical evidence drawn from national surveys in Canada and eight related case studies is used to explore the current learning activities of those in paid employment, housework and volunteer work, addressing all forms of learning including: formal schooling, further education courses, informal training and self-directed learning, particularly in the context of organisational and technological change.Proposing an expanded conceptual framework for investigating the relationships between learning and work, the contributors offer new insights into the ways in which adult learning adapts to and helps reshape the wide contemporary world of work throughout the life course.

'We need more learning opportunities for adults, not fewer; but these must be accompanied by structural changes and reflexivity. Otherwise, we shall once again blame the victims. This book will add mightily to the debates around these issues – and more such studies are needed in other contexts.' - Alan Rogers, International Review of Education 2012'David Livingstone has a particular talent for ‘reversing the optic’ in his analyses of how people learn in and through work in the contemporary world. In this latest book, Livingstone brings unpaid work from the unfocused periphery to the centre of the field of vision. He offers a ‘real world’ reason for doing so, arguing that substantial informal learning related to household work and volunteer work is transferable to paid employment but virtually all of it is currently ignored, at a substantial cost to economies and the health and well-being of our societies.' - Karen Evans, British Journal of Educational Studies 2012

D. W. Livingstone is Canada Research Chair in Lifelong Learning and Work at the University of Toronto, and Professor and Head of the Centre for the Study of Education and Work in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE/UT). His books include The Education-Jobs Gap (2004) and Education and Jobs: Exploring the Gaps (2009).