Workplace learning in digital age: insights from ethnographies in organizations

Description

Digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence and robotics, are often said to create dramatic transformation of our work, skills and ways of learning on the job. Some macro-economic scenarios predict, for example, that within two decades digitalization will lead to 46% of occupations becoming obsolete; with creative jobs being least susceptible to automation. In this talk, I will discuss these technological developments, their consequences for skill acquisition and provide an alternative perspective to such common macro-economic views. Based on several ethnographic cases, I will show how and why many current scenarios of digitalization differ from everyday organizational realities. I will thereby debunk common misconceptions around what consequences digitization holds for learning at work and discuss how such grounded ethnographies can help in designing the workplace learning of the future.