Writing learning stories: The case of Telcotech

Countless publications on the future of management education and on qualifications needed at the workplace emphasize the need for learning from experience, (Smith, 2000).
While practice can be viewed as a rich source of new knowledge and learning about management (Kim, 1999), the learners’ active participation in learning is essential to capture the learnings occurring in job assignments (Ulrich/Greenfield, 1995).
Experience based learning
Experience-based learning aims at learning from these work-based experiences to prevent the repetition of specific failures and to help generalize learnings from specific challenging situations (Smith/Morphey, 1994). By pushing the application of knowledge towards the solution of actual workplace problems in which learners can see the results of their decisions (Fulmer, 1997), experience-based learning occurs within the context of an application and not in an abstract, decontextualized way (Renkl/Mandl/Gruber, 1997). Learning then becomes problem-oriented, providing developmental outcomes that can be applied in the work setting (Bunning, 1996.). Additionally, the active involvement of the learner in the learning process increases the likelihood that the learning will be retained as mere participation in management tasks and action is not enough for management learning to occur (McKenna, 1999).