Learning at Work: Maximising the Potential of Lifelong Learners at the Workplace

Abstract

Lifelong learners are individuals who pursue learning as a voluntary and self-driven vocation. Given their commitment to continual improvement, an organisation's lifelong learners can potentially increase performance overall. This study aims to identify the factors that motivate lifelong learners to pursue lifelong learning and the challenges that they face in attaining this goal. In doing this, a group of employees across three organisations was selected based on their performance on three online learning platforms. They were then interviewed to gain an understanding of their specific motivations and challenges in pursuing self-directed learning. Three considerations were made for the organisations when planning and investing in the appropriate interventions to enable and support lifelong learning within their organisations based on the factors and barriers that were discovered from the interviews.