Partnering with a renewable energy industry to reconceptualise the ‘skills gap’ between HE andthe workplace

Jennifer Scoles,

University of Stirling

HEA Annual Conference 3-4 July, 2013

Doctoral Study

Professional knowing in an emerging sector:

Understanding the practices of engineers in the Renewable Energy

industry

Contact: j.e.scoles@stir.ac.uk; theofficedog.wordpress.comSupervisor: Prof Tara Fenwick, School of Education

Situating the case study

• Sector emergence

• Changing profession

• Dissatisfied employers

• ‘Skills gap’ discourse

Problematising current research• Recent methodological approaches:

- Skills Investment Plan for the Energy Sector (Skills Development Scotland, 2011)

- Future skill needs for the green economy (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, 2009 )

• Traditional cognitive approach to knowing• Taken for granted and routine aspects• Micro-practices

Practice Lens• Knowing-in-practice (Gherardi, 2000; Orlikowski, 2002)

Knowledge is structured in practice in its relation to ‘objects’ – the artifacts with which practitioners interact in their everyday work – and ‘ends’ – the products of the creation and manipulation of those objects by the actors.

(Corradi, Gherardi, and Verzelloni, 2010: 276)

• Sociomaterial approaches, i.e. Actor Network Theory (Latour, 1987; 2005)

Articulating Practice • Practice as an epistemic object (Nicolini, 2009)

• Professional practice is often messy, relational and precarious

• Two practices under study: 1) The practice of the social scientist: how do we choose to articulate practice?2) The practice under study: the dimension of practice in the context in which it is performed

Ethnographic methodology

• Extended period of time in the field• Multiple tools to gather data:

- semi-structured interviews including graphic elicitation tasks- participant observation and listening - document analysis- work shadowing

• Tracing the relationships between participants and objects of their practice to elicit instances of knowing

Partnering with a Renewable Energy organisation: TurboUK

- Negotiation: 3 months - Duration: 3 months, later

extended to 6; 2-4 days a week

- Support: senior management and a principle host

- Researcher space: desk, access card and meeting room access

- 13 key participants- Interim review and

concluding focus group with management

Strengths• Shared aims and values• Emergent design of ethnography - fieldwork methods

altered/added to during stay in field• Allowed time to:- Build relationships- Observe practices before, during and after an event & at different

times of the day- Consider what were important actors/objects to follow- Surface taken for granted assumptions

• Feed back findings to HE curriculum developers and professional development practitioners

Realities and Challenges• Take advantage of personal and professional

contacts• Finding the balance of what constitutes an

‘ethnography’ and what is practically possible• Tedious and slow• Painfully awkward and emotionally draining• Only ever partial view (but that is ok!)• Reflexive, reflexive, reflexive• Funding for similar projects

Summary• Case study of an emerging industry:

Renewable energy

• Problematising current methodologies

• Practice lens and ethnographic methods

• Strengths and challenges of partnering with an organisation to conduct practice-based research to enhance HE outcomes

ReferencesCorradi, G., Gherardi, S., and Verzelloni, L., 2010. Through the practice-lens: Where is the bandwagon of practice-based studies heading? Management Learning, 41(3), pp. 265-283.European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training, 2009. Future skill needs for the green economy, Available at: www.cedefop.europa.eu/EN/Files/5501_en.pdf [12/08/11]. Gherardi, S., 2000. Practice-based theorizing on learning and knowing in organisations: An introduction. Organization, 7(2), pp. 211-223.Latour, B., 1987. Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Milton Keynes: Open University Press.Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Nicolini, D., 2009. Articulating practice through the interview to the double, Management Learning, 40(2), pp.195-212.Orlikowski, W.J., 2002. Knowing in practice: Enacting a collective capability in distributed organizing. Organization Science, 13(3), pp. 249-273.Skills Development Scotland, 2011. The skills investment plan for the energy sector, Available at: www.skillsdevelopmentscotland.co.uk/media/331209/sds_energysip_final.pdf [13/04/12].

Any questions?