Stability of the learning and development survey : findings for mature aged local government and private healthcare organisations.


Autoria(s): Tones, Megan J.; Pillay, Hitendra K.
Data(s)

2009

Resumo

This article investigates work related learning and development amongst mature aged workers from a lifespan developmental psychology perspective. The current study follows on from research regarding the construction and revision of the Learning and Development Survey (LDS; Tones & Pillay, 2008). Designed to measure adaptive development for work related learning, the revised LDS (R-LDS) encompasses goal selection, engagement and disengagement from individual and organisational perspectives. Previous survey findings from a mixed age sample of local government workers suggest that mature aged workers aged over 45 years are less likely to report engagement in learning and development goals than younger workers, which is partly due to insufficient opportunities at work. In the current paper, exploratory factor analysis was used to investigate responses to the R-LDS amongst two groups of mature aged workers from a local government (LG) and private healthcare (PH) organisation to determine the stability of the R-LDS. Organisational constraints to development accounted for almost a quarter of the variance in R-LDS scores for both samples, while remaining factors emerged in different orders for each data set. Organisational opportunities for development explained about 17% of the variance in R-LDS scores in the LG sample, while the individual goal disengagement factor contributed a comparable proportion of variance to R-LDS scores for the PH sample. Findings from the current study indicate that opportunities for learning and development at work may be age structured and biased towards younger workers. Implications for professional practice are discussed and focus on improving the engagement of mature aged workers.

Formato

application/pdf

Identificador

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/27790/

Publicador

Monash University

Relação

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/27790/2/27790.pdf

http://www.era.edu.au/myfiles/uploads/2009%20ERA%20Conference%20Proceedings.pdf

Tones, Megan J. & Pillay, Hitendra K. (2009) Stability of the learning and development survey : findings for mature aged local government and private healthcare organisations. In Proceedings of the 8th National Conference of Emerging Researchers in Ageing: A new era for ageing research: What's in your toolkit?, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 185-190.

Direitos

Copyright 2009 please consult the authors

Fonte

Office of Education Research; School of Cultural & Professional Learning; Faculty of Education

Tipo

Conference Paper