Educating through work. Training processes and professionalisation in organisational contexts

Abstract

The article explores the ongoing “reversal” between school and work: schooling, marked by what Gert Biesta has termed the learnification of education, has progressively reduced its educational function, while work in the tertiary sector is increasingly emerging as a space for reflection, meaning-making, and identity construction (subjectification, cf. Biesta). Within this scenario, corporate learning can be understood as a pedagogical phenomenon in which reflective and relational practices generate a form of “bottom-up education”, capable of addressing existential and self-realisation questions within organisational contexts. Situated within the field of the pedagogy of work and inspired by G. Biesta’s thought, the analysis offers a critical reading of the relationship between learning and subjectification, recognising contemporary work as a cultural laboratory in which education is redefined as a shared practice of meaning-making, responsibility, and professional growth.