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Working at companies in old age – problem or opportunity? Company strategies for dealing with demographic change Demographic change usually confronts companies with a double challenge. Enterprises have to work with ageing staffs, while a veritable “war for talent” is underway to attract young skilled staff. This article explores the different strategies German enterprises are adopting to meet this challenge. At the same time, it distinguishes between tried-and-proven staff strategies whic…
PISA and adult education – temptations and open questions “The PISA results are an invitation for the debate and for developing the research rather than conclusive judgeements on the miracle recipe to improve the educational performance” (Heller 2003, p. 30). Earmarking for the discussion of policies of adult education after PISA is that the results are taken to express most different positions in little differentiated way. To this also the typical reception problems contribute, such as t…
The book deals, for the first time, with the further education and training participation of adults in a systematic and regionally disaggregated fashion. The analyses differentiate not only socio-economic and demographic characteristics, but also regional contexts. Some regions show particularities in further education behavior. Additional case studies in these regions reveal enhancing or impeding regional contexts that have an impact on education chances of adults within regions. These regio…
The paper tackles the issue of procedures for the validation of competences, which are used in the tertiary education sector in order to evaluate an individual’s study ability on the basis of his/her vocational qualifications. This contested terrain will be explored by means of the University of Hamburg’s validation procedure (the so-called Eingangsprüfungsverfahren, §38 HmbHG). The focus of interest will be put on a qualitative reconstruction of individual decision-making processes during thes…
Over the past 15 years, a variety of approaches have been developed in (adult) education contexts to validate formal, non-formal and informal competences and thus harness them for lifelong learning purposes. Despite the development, testing and evaluation of appropriate procedures as well as process-accompanying research and procedural clarification processes, a nationwide implementation can not be observed. It can be deduced from these findings that the low degree of implementation of correspo…
The article focusses on the importance of time for the political adult education. Current socio-cultural and socio-economic challenges – in particular: the commodification and acceleration in the context of education and learning – results in a wide range of pressing time issues. However the adult education und the political education pay little attention to the importance of time. For this reason, this issue will be deepened in the article. First, the situation of the political adult education…
This assumption does not seem plausible at first glance, but rather absurd instead. The regular manifestation of modern age as a knowledge-based society on the one hand as well as the consensual acceptance of the appeal for lifelong learning on the other hand, create the opposite of an image in which the pedagogical aspect of continuing education has been lost. The author argues that learners are increasingly left unsupported, lifelong learning has become more fiction than reality and continui…
In adult education, fields of activity have lost their strict boundaries: administrative employees also perform pedagogical work – such as counselling, for instance – and full-time pedagogical employees also have to handle administrative work – e.g. in project management. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, administrative employees play an important role in the pedagogical functioning of institutions of adult education, although this factor is often neglected in both research and measures of…
