Injecting Learning into Work: Enhancing Career Advancement through Transformation of Professional Development in Technical Career Paths

世界经济论坛估计，到2020年，由于破坏性的劳动力变化，可能会失去多达500万个工作岗位，这一事态发展引发了人们对失业、就业不足和工人重新技能需求的担忧。这个项目探索如何通过开发在软件开发领域的协作工作任务中嵌入学习机会的方法来解决这个问题。这项研究旨在洞察工作结构和管理方式的不同特点，这些特点在长期和短期内都会影响工作在努力、时间、学习效益和生产率方面的权衡。这些洞察力随后可以被管理者用来在特定的工作场景中就学习与生产力的优先顺序做出更具战略性的选择。该项目特别关注在基于团队的工作中嵌入学习机会，利用基于团队的软件开发的新行业实践来创建软件开发中共享认知的新范式。在进行这项工作时，该项目将为将使用开发的工具的技术课程团队提供更多的教育机会，并将这些工具发布给公众使用。该项目的实验工作将在一个在线软件开发课程中进行，该课程将连接多个大陆的校园的学习者，并向试图进行再培训的行业专业人员提供课程内容。本研究采用并进一步发展的这种特定的协作工作范式将为在工作中嵌入学习提供独特的机会，并提供调整学习与生产力的优先级别的能力，从而创造进行科学研究的理想社会结构。计划工作的研究目标是：(1)发现如何开发技术来有效地控制基于团队的工作中的相互依赖程度，并通过这样做来控制学习和生产力之间的权衡，以及(2)量化短期学习对长期生产力的长期积极影响，以便在面临有利于学习的短期生产力下降的情况下，有可能使整体生产力最大化。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The World Economic Forum estimates that up to 5 million jobs may be lost to disruptive labor changes by 2020, a development that leads to concerns regarding unemployment, underemployment, and the need for workers to reskill. This project explores how to address this problem by developing methods for embedding learning opportunities within collaborative work tasks in the area of software development. The research aims to gain insight into the differing characteristics of how work is structured and managed that affect trade-offs in terms of effort, time, learning benefit, and productivity both in the long and short term. These insights can then be used by managers to make more strategic choices about prioritization of learning versus productivity within specific work episodes. This project specifically focuses on embedding learning opportunities within team-based work, leveraging a new industry practice for team-based software development to create a new paradigm for shared cognition in software development. In doing this work, the project will provide additional educational opportunities for teams in technical courses who will use the developed tools, as well as releasing the tools for public use.The experimental work in this project will be conducted within an online software development course that connects learners on campuses on multiple continents as well as in offerings of the course content to industry professionals attempting to retrain. This specific collaborative work paradigm adopted in this research and further developed under this research will afford unique opportunities for embedding learning during work and the ability to adjust the level of priority attached to learning vs productivity and thus creates the ideal social structure in which to conduct the scientific investigation. The research goals of the planned work are: (1) Discover how to develop technology for effectively manipulating the level of interdependence within team-based work, and in so doing to manipulate the trade-off between learning and productivity, and (2) Quantify the long term positive impact of learning in the short term on productivity in the long term so that it is possible to maximize productivity overall in the face of decreases in short term productivity in favor of learning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.