Education is one sector being challenged by aging staff, as well as by increased pressure to innovate. In order to cope with these challenges, educational institutions require teaching staff members, who include teachers, support staff and managers, to show a high level of employability. In this survey-based study, the predictive value of…

Expertise is featured by continued high performance in a particular domain. Expertise research has primarily focused on absolute expertise in structured domains such as chess and emphasized the significance of deliberate practice for expertise development. We investigated the development of relative expertise in commercial domains as part of…

TVET educator roles and identities vary internationally, and are subject to repositioning, for example as the relative significance of institutions and the workplace change within national systems. In English apprenticeships, a key position has long been occupied by competence assessors, whose non-teaching role has related uneasily to those of…

This study examines Finnish apprenticeship training stakeholders' perceptions of vocational expertise and experiences of workplace learning and guidance. The semi-structured interview data was collected in 2015 in two vocational fields: the social and health care services sector (five workplaces) and the technology sector (five workplaces). The…

Teachers' innovative work behavior and professional development is receiving more attention lately. More precisely, it is argued that teachers' formal and informal learning is crucial to anticipate and deal with continuous changes and innovations in technology and didactics, for example. Therefore, this study researches the teachers' innovative…

Over 25 years ago, Brown and Duguid ("Organisation Science," 2(1), 40-57, 1991) highlighted the differences between the way organisations formally describe and delineate jobs and the actual practices of their employees. This paper combines ideas from their seminal contribution with theories of "job crafting" and identity to…

The purpose of this study is to analyse the development of two apprentices' adaptive expertise in fingerprint examination across a two-year training program. The apprentices were selected from a large number of candidates to be trained at the Forensic Laboratory of the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation. The problem addressed was how the…

The purpose of the present study was to examine expertise in magic by interviewing 16 prominent Finnish magicians who were identified earlier through a social network analysis of 120 Finnish magicians. A semi-structured interview was administered that addressed the participants' histories; their relationship to magic, the nature of their…

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine young diplomats' socialization to the professional expert culture of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland over a six-month on-job training period, as part of their preparation for service in the diplomatic corps. Using social network analysis, we analyzed departments' internal social…

Recent developments in competence-based education have motivated institutions of vocational education and training (VET) to improve the links or connectivity between learning in school and learning in the workplace, which has been a problem for decades. In previous research, a theoretical framework describing the underlying aspects of…