People on training: what are they going through?

On April 23rd, I will be speaking at the Biennale de l’Education, de la Formation et des Pratiques Professionnelles in Paris, on the topic of adult education and retraining as an experience

Here is a summary of my presentation. The words of the people I interviewed continue to resonate and shape my research journey to this day

Some adults of different ages undertake training or professional reconversion after a professional experience that has come to a painful end. When their training is over or when they return to work, they all express “uncertainty and (...) loneliness”, in other words, “unlearning” (Pineau, 2004). The biographical interview experiment shows, however, that a process is at work, pitting regrets for a past reviewed through the prism of the known, and skills now rendered useless, against an uncertain future that will enable a new positioning based on values. Professional activity seen as experience (Barbier, 2011) has triggered an identity crisis (Dubar, 2007) affecting relationships with oneself, others and the possible. The life trajectory, made up of experiences, emotions, reasoning, wishes and rejections, abilities and values, will undergo profound changes.

We have called this journey “experienciation”, characterized by informal learning that leads to a societal commitment based on self-discovery; if it is first an experience of mourning, the process is then realized through the awareness of aspects of oneself in a period of professional latency. At the end of this process, the questioning gives way to a desire to express oneself in a very different way on the social scene, in particular by taking up a new professional activity.