Constructing a personal learning network in a corporate organization: The perspective of new hires

Abstract

Many companies have training programs where new hires and employees are intended to learn their assigned role and how to manage different tasks which might be out of their comfort zone, experience or profession. However, given the rapid pace of recent knowledge creation developments and the inability of fonnal training programs to keep up with the all required workplace learning, professionals and employees are in need of different resources to manage their assigned roles. The study aims to understand how the new hires in a corporate organization construct their Personal Learning Networks (PLN), what the components of the PLN are and how PLN plays a role in learning and performing entitled roles and responsibilities of them in order to meet their need of learning. As the qualitative research methodology, phenomenology was used to implement this study. Semi structured interviews were conducted with 20 participants who are newly hired in a corporate organization within telecommunication sector in Istanbul. The collected data were analyzed with content analysis method. The data analysis revealed that new hires learn their assigned roles and how to manage different tasks through infom1al learning. This informal learning process was based on their PLN. However, findings also showed that each participant has different preference order when using different source of information. Among responses it emerged that, source of information preference order is under influence of individual factors such as individual interest and educational background, and contextual factors such as structure of the project and availability of learning resources.