WorkLore

a.k.a. School is School and Work is Work

We talk in learning and development a lot about lifelong learning. How learning and working should go hand in hand as people progress through their careers. 

But we are still designing for learning and work to be separate. 

Case in point.

I took a course to learn something new. Exactly the kind of reason you should take a course. 

It was an intermediate level course. So not introductory but not advanced. 

I learned from the course materials, but I also didn’t need some of them because I had experienced what they were teaching and learned those lessons in the workplace. 

That’s fine. As an adult learner (and as an adult educator at times), this is what I would expect. 

The assignments were applicable, generally organized as case studies or scenarios with problem solving. Though on occasion, the scenarios felt a bit artificial, as if the person who wrote them hadn’t actually experience the scenario before. 

I answered the questions associated with the case / scenario based on the course materials and my experience. 

The feedback? 

“Quote this”

Quote my own experience? How? 

Citation styles tell me how to quote other people, whether in writing or informally, and how to quote myself if I’ve published something. 

But my lived experience? 

No guidelines. 

My experience, directly applicable to the case, got me docked marks, even though the feedback recognized it was valuable. 

Should I have been explicit about this being related to my own experience? 

Maybe. 

But that also felt a bit weird, and frankly, because I know this already, it’s not necessarily something that I think of as quotable. In the industry, it’s common knowledge. 

It was clear the learning system was designed for newbies. Not for someone with lived experience. 

And then I thought. Is this how experienced professional newcomers feel when coming here and being told their experience isn’t enough? 

That hit home. I’m going to go off and think about the implications of this now.