Effects of the Corona pandemic on job-related learning in adult life

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Since the first lockdown in March 2020, it has been discussed widely and controversially how the Corona pandemic has affected learning participation, processes, and outcomes. However, these debates have focused heavily on children and adolescents in initial education. The question of how the pandemic has affected learning in adult age, particularly job-related adult education and training (AET), has been largely neglected in public discourse and research. The necessity of lifelong learning has grown in recent decades due to technological change and demographic ageing of the workforce, yet the participation in AET remains socially stratified. The Corona pandemic has now profoundly changed the supply and demand for adult education in a short period of time. Traditional AET in the form of on-site courses has largely collapsed, and many firms have reduced their investment in training. At the same time, new opportunities for professional learning have emerged for some groups of employees due to short-time work, while others had less time because they had to care for their children when working from home. Finally, the crisis led to accelerated digitization, which has created the need for many employees to learn new things quickly. Overall, therefore, it is yet to be seen—and so far not sufficiently studied empirically—how the pandemic has affected participation in different forms of AET, which learning barriers and opportunities the crisis brought, and how this has changed patterns of social inequality in AET. Since AET will be a key component in mitigating pandemic-related distortions in the labour market, it is important to answer these questions soon in order to derive targeted adult education strategies.To this end, we plan to conduct empirical analyses using large-scale panel data from NEPS collected annually since the late 2000s through fall 2020-spring 2021, providing detailed longitudinal information on nonformal and informal job-related learning among employed adults. Our program consists of three sequential work packages: in the first step, we will describe the extent and form of pandemic-related changes in AET among different groups of employees. Subsequently, we will examine how the crisis has affected adult learning. Stepwise regressions and decomposition techniques will help to assess the impact of pandemic-related changes in working conditions, family life, and well-being on AET participation. In the third step, we plan to use fixed effects regressions to identify causal effects of the pandemic on AET participation and to analyse how the crisis changed prevailing patterns of social inequalities in AET.