Supporting Employee Learning: Lessons from Workplace Learning Organisations in Singapore

Workers today must engage in continuous learning to adapt to frequent job and skills changes caused by rapid technological advancement and uncertainty. Workplace learning is an effective form of learning as it helps the employee connect new knowledge to existing knowledge and make sense of it in context, which can improve retention and the transfer of learning. However, the workplace conditions must be appropriate for the individual to learn, and organisations can create supportive learning conditions by means of policies, systems and practices. In 2018, the National Centre of Excellence for Workplace Learning (NACE) led by Nanyang Polytechnic was set up to enable Singapore organisations to support employee development through workplace learning. NACE developed the National Workplace Learning Framework to guide organisations to implement policies, systems and practices related to workplace learning in a systematic and holistic manner. This chapter discusses the impacts of these policies, systems and practices on employee learning and aims to identify a set of best practices in employee learning for organisations to draw from, to create the right conditions at the workplace to support employee learning.