SELF-MANAGED LEARNING

Self Managed Learning and Life-Long Development



Self Managed Learning and Life-Long Development

Task 1

Introduction

The significance of learning can easily be found in the scholarly literature, as it the vital cause of competitive benefits for any business & that changing environments contributing for development and learning can improve organizational and individual operations (Pfeffer & Veiga, 1999; Marsick & Watkins, 1999; Ellinger, Yang, & Howton, 2002) As human resource professionals, leaders and managers seek to form learning bases that leverage informal and formal studying, learners are becoming more and more challenging to turn constant lifetime learners and presume more duty for their own development and learning so that they can stay marketable and employable (Vann, 1996; Carré, 2000). Simultaneous with these challenges, the intensifying development of technology increased in number of global challengers, and increasing stress on cost effectiveness & efficiency demand that firms turning more reactive in dealing learning requirements and following more conciliatory strategies (Stansfield, 1997; Smith, 2001; Dunlap & Grabinger, 2003).

Thus delivering self-managed learning and flexible training approaches have appeared as firms' reactions to meet the multifaceted requirements related with the altering environment of work. Self-managed learning (SML) has been a powerful adult education notion among the adult learning field since last thirty years. (Guglielmino & Murdick, 1997; Zemke, 1998; Guglielmino, 2001)

However, it has been suggested in a study that adult education has received inadequate attention in context of enhancing performance and that expertness is required amongst human resource development personnel when education is viewed as to be the suitable intervention for performance enhancement (Holton, Swanson & Naquin 2001).

1.1 Self-Managed Learning and Lifelong Development

Adults learning have been a main question after the establishment of learning as a specialized area of exercise in the 1920. It has been admitted after 80 years that there is neither a particular answer nor any specific theory which could explain various models related to adult learning, the study further argues that all that is known about adult learner till now is learning take place itself as a process (Merriam, 2001). Merriam has distinguished the information base on adult education as being constituted of “a mosaic of theories sets of rationales, explanations and models” (p. 3). One significant part of that mosaic is (SML) self-managed learning, which believed as an initial multifarious adult learning approach that has been a spectacular area to study since last thirty years (( Mezirow, 1985; Merriam & Caffarella, 1991 & 99).

SML has been diversely clear in the previously conducted studies (Caffarella, 1993; Larsson, & Svensson, 1995; Carré, 2000). Regardless of the lacking of a general definition, SML is much broadly thought as self-studying in which student/learner has the main task for preparing, carrying out, and assessing their personal experiences related to learning (Merriam & Caffarella, 1991 & 99). SML can take place both outside and inside of the boundaries of proper learning institutions and does not essentially generalize learning in isolation, as learners might sketch on others as resources and helpers to help in their self-managed learning ...