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

自2020年3月首次封城以来，冠状病毒疫情如何影响学习参与、过程和结果一直受到广泛而有争议的讨论。然而，这些辩论主要集中在接受启蒙教育的儿童和青少年身上。在公共讨论和研究中，大流行病如何影响成年人的学习，特别是与工作有关的成人教育和培训的问题在很大程度上被忽视了。近几十年来，由于技术变革和劳动力人口老龄化，终身学习的必要性有所增加，但参与AET的社会阶层仍然存在。日冕大流行在短时间内深刻改变了成人教育的供求关系。传统的现场课程形式的AET基本上已经崩溃，许多公司已经减少了对培训的投资。与此同时，由于工作时间短，一些雇员群体出现了新的专业学习机会，而另一些人则因为在家工作而不得不照顾子女，时间更少。最后，危机导致数字化加速，这使得许多员工需要快速学习新事物。因此，总的来说，还没有看到-迄今为止还没有充分的研究-流行病如何影响不同形式的AET的参与，危机带来了哪些学习障碍和机会，以及这如何改变了AET中的社会不平等模式。由于AET将成为减轻流行病相关劳动力市场扭曲的关键组成部分，因此必须尽快回答这些问题，以便制定有针对性的成人教育战略。为此，我们计划使用从2000年代后期到2020年秋季至2021年春季每年收集的NEPS大规模面板数据进行实证分析，提供就业成年人非正规和非正式工作相关学习的详细纵向信息。我们的计划包括三个连续的工作包：在第一步中，我们将描述不同员工群体中与流行病相关的AET变化的程度和形式。随后，我们将研究危机如何影响成人学习。逐步回归和分解技术将有助于评估流行病相关的工作条件，家庭生活和福祉对AET参与的影响。在第三步中，我们计划使用固定效应回归来确定流行病对AET参与的因果影响，并分析危机如何改变AET中社会不平等的普遍模式。

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.