Employees today must engage in continuous learning to adapt to frequent job and skills changes. Increasingly, organisations are embracing workplace learning as a means to equip their employees with competencies to take on new work. For effective learning to occur, it is essential to establish a work setting that is conducive to the acquisition and application of knowledge and skills. Employers’ interventions can create the conditions at the workplace to facilitate employee learning.

In 2018, the National Centre of Excellence for Workplace Learning (“NACE”) was set up by SkillsFuture Singapore and Nanyang Polytechnic to help organisations implement systems and practices to create workplace conditions that promote employee learning. NACE does this through the National Workplace Learning Framework (“Framework”), which lays out six elements of effective workplace learning – strategy, leadership, planning, training needs analysis, environment and implementation and processes.

This paper examines the impact of interventions by employers in Singapore to establish a work setting that fosters employee learning, on learning outcomes. Qualitative data from organisations that had created supportive workplace learning conditions, through the implementation of structured learning systems and practices that incorporated aspects of the Framework, found that employee learning was effective with the processes and practices in place. The findings from this qualitative study were corroborated by a quantitative study conducted on 397 workers three months after they had attended a CET course to investigate how employees’ perception of workplace conditions, through the systems and practices in place, might affect perceived utilisation of learned skills. Significant positive correlations were found between supportive workplace conditions and skills utilisation.

The findings from the studies provide rich lessons for organisations looking to facilitate and enhance employee learning. Organisations can reference the Framework to implement systems and practices that create the right conditions at the workplace for effective employee learning.