Ph.D. project exploring how adults without upper secondary education learn their trade, develop a vocational identity, and obtain a trade certificate through the Norwegian practice candidate scheme.
For this project, I have interviewed a selection of participants who are using, or have recently used, this scheme to obtain a trade certificate as cleaning operators, professional drivers, or healthcare workers.
The aim is to generate new knowledge about how adults who have not previously completed upper secondary education learn in the workplace through both informal and formal processes.
The study is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with 29 adult workers. The analysis examines how experience, responsibility, and social recognition contribute to adults gradually seeing themselves as professionals, and how they manage being labelled “unskilled.”
The project seeks to provide new insight into how the workplace can function as a site for learning, and how schemes for recognition of prior learning and trade certification can support lifelong learning and social inclusion in working life. My PhD project is part of the Doctoral Programme in Educational Sciences at OsloMet.
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Per Andersson, professor, University of Linköping, Sweden
