Informal learning mechanisms: Continual competence development for becoming successful in professional work

Abstract

In today’s society, learning is a lifelong pursuit for all professionals who want to become and stay successful in their profession. However, in contrast to formal academic training, workplace learning is often informal and relatively unnoticed by competence developers in both academia and industry. This paper therefore sets out to identify and describe how such learning takes place in practice. More specifically, this paper presents the nine learning mechanisms that was identified from the literature and describes how they takes place in practice to make people successful at work.