Industries are currently experiencing several kinds of disruptive changes, including digital transformation and environmental and health emergencies. Despite intense discussion about disruptive changes in companies, the impact of such changes on workplace learning is still underexplored. In this study, we investigated the impact of disruptive changes on informal learning practices according to the perspectives of employers, employees and adult educators. Informal learning was operationalised along a continuum between organised informal learning (led by an instructor and intentional) and everyday informal learning (led by contextual factors, accidental, and unintentional). Fifty-five companies’ representatives (average age = 43.2 years; SD = 11) from three European countries (Finland, Switzerland, and Italy) and four industrial fields (bioeconomy, tourism, textile and building sectors) were interviewed. The interviews were further triangulated with questionnaires collected by employees from the same companies (N = 141; average age = 40.2 years, SD = 17.8). Questionnaire data were used to collect detailed information on individual informal workplace learning (IWL) strategies and digital technologies adopted in organised informal learning. The interview data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. A coding scheme was developed with five macro-categories organised into 23 sub-categories. Occurrence and co-occurrence analysis were performed to identify which individual and organisational factors and approaches support most learning, according to interviewees. Interviewees reported the possibility of interacting with colleagues and being autonomous as the main sources of everyday informal learning processes. Employees from the same companies reported model learning, vicarious feedback, and applying someone’s own ideas as the most frequent IWL strategies. Organised informal learning was mainly based on knowledge transfer, which reflects passive cognitive engagement by employees. Specifically, digital technologies in organised informal learning were poorly used for supporting reflection, constructive processes, and collaborative knowledge construction. The results suggest that participants believed that higher forms of cognitive engagement are possible only within face-to-face organised informal training or in everyday informal learning. Possible explanations of the results and practical implications are discussed.

Inclusion is understood in various ways in research, in documents guiding educational practices, and in stakeholders’ speeches. This study contributes to the European discussion on the ambiguity of inclusion by investigating the descriptions of Finnish vocational education and training (VET) administration personnel both at the national and vocational institution levels. It gives light on the interconnections between participants’ and Finnish and EU-level interpretations of inclusion in VET. We ask how the representatives of national educational administration and vocational institutions’ administration describe inclusion. The data was collected in the spring of 2021 by interviewing representatives (N=18) of national educational administration and vocational institution administration. We used Qvortrup and Qvortrup’s (2018) definition of inclusion as our theoretical lens. The participants’ descriptions of inclusion were constructed by portraying the significance of students’ equity, equality, participation, accessibility, special support and belonging in the VET community at the numeric level but they lack consideration of students’ activity in those communities and students’ own experiences. The participants did not address the relevance of different social arenas of inclusion or exclusion in their descriptions, but they described VET colleges as one social system. Moreover, the participants did not reflect on the degree of being included or excluded. Their perspectives were constructed through the Finnish VET context, and they created a strong promise of education, which would provide equal opportunities for all to study and acquire competence according to the qualification requirements in VET. Their approaches were based rather on the identification of special needs students and their needs than on considerations for social cohesion, active citizenship and lifelong learning. This fostered the invitation for the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture and the National Board of Education to define inclusion more precisely in VET so that the education providers would have an explicit framework and goals to advance inclusion in practice.

The path towards Education 4.0 in Vietnam requires new mindsets and new competencies of teachers and educational institutions. In the Empowering Vietnamese VET Teachers for Transformation towards Education 4.0 (EMVITET) Capacity Building in Higher Education Erasmus+ project, Education 4.0 competencies in pedagogy, digital technologies and learning ecosystems were developed during a three-and-a-half-year process (2019–2022). Six Vietnamese educational institutions participated in the project and three European universities provided the facilitation of the process. This article describes how the EMVITET project was designed and implemented to create an empowering and effective learning process by utilising a participatory and collaborative approach. The other aim is to illustrate the impacts and implications of the project and draw conclusions on how to build a sustainable learning ecosystem for Education 4.0 in Vietnam.