Is HRD the future of andragogy?

1. Is HRD the future of andragogy? CAE 213 Intro to Adult Education Toccoa Falls College

2. Andragogy: AE or HRD? • The individual controls his or her own learning. • The organization controls the worker’s learning.

3. HRD • Human Resource Development, to be strategic and useful, must position itself as a strategic partner within the organizational structure; taking on the same level of importance as finance, production, and marketing. • Firms expect a return on the money invested in their employees.

4. HRD • Human Resource Development in non-profit organizations equips learners to contribute meaningfully to organizational goals that are essential for organizational survival. • HRD is first and foremost concerned with maintaining and/or improving performance at the organizational, process, and individual levels.

5. What is the key difference? • In AE, the learner controls his or her learning. • In HRD, the organization controls the learning.

6. HRD   • When the individual’s needs are consistent with the organization’s needs, there is not tension. • When the organization’s and the individual’s needs are not congruent, the organization will require learning and a tension will exist between the individual learner and the organization. • Effective HRD professionals have the ability to find an optimum balance in each situation.

7. Theoretical Foundations of Adult Learning • There are four phases: • Need assessment – determine what learning is needed. • Strategy creation – Create a strategy and recruit resources to achieve goals. • Implementation – Implement the learning strategy. • Evaluation – Assess the attainment of the goal and the process of reaching it.

8.   AE • The determining of learner need tends to be reactive rather than strategic in AE. • Learning professionals are portrayed as reacting to the needs expressed by learners. This assumes that: • The learner is fully aware of his or her need. • The learner can accurately access specific need. • The learner will initiate learning. • The learner will maintain a commitment to learning.

9.  AE ---- HRD  Brookfield (1986) observes, “To take learners’ definitions of need as always determining appropriate practice is to cast the facilitator as a technician within the consumer mode. It is to remove from the facilitator all professional judgment and to turn him or her into a “knee-jerk” satisfier of consumer needs. Education becomes one giant department store in which facilitators are providers of whatever learning (consumers) believe will make them happy” (p. 97).

10. AE balances withHRD • Need – Engage learners to gain high motivation. Do not expect self-reporting of needs to be accurate for either the individual or the organization. • Create – Engage learners to gain higher validity in the selected learning strategies. • Implement – Engage learner to better mediate the actual learning. • Evaluate – Engage learners to gain higher self-reflection and integration of knowledge and expertise.

11. The Future of Andragogy? • AE and HRD will continue to develop. • Control in AE will rest in the hands of the individual. The individual will seek to become literate, personally transformed, spiritually empowered, and socially emancipated. • Control in HRD will rest in the hands of the organization which will develop employees for organizational success.

12. The Future of Andragogy? • The discipline needs a more clearly defined theory. [Page 4 is a good beginning.] • The discipline needs to develop clear measurements for key processes and elements. • The discipline needs empirically demonstrative case studies of techniques that produce better outcomes.