Work Based Learning, Enterprise Education and small family business

The world of education and work are adapting to the ever-changing political, economic and policy landscape as evidenced by approaches to enterprise education and work based learning. Work based learning often focuses on the development of employability skills of learners (e.g. Costley and Armsby, 2007) whereas the focus of enterprise education is often placed on developing skills, attributes and behaviours to encourage entrepreneurship and to help people cope with the uncertainties associated with the flexible market ‘gig’ economy (e.g. Gibb, 1993). This paper compares and contrasts these two educational concepts and in so doing looks at where they overlap and what one might learn from the other (Jones and Iredale, 2014). The paper draws on the literature to build theory and assesses the blending of the two concepts via case study analysis founded upon two Erasmus+ programme projects that tackle succession planning in small family businesses. This paper addresses issues around succession planning in small family businesses and the design of a higher education curriculum that brings together Work Based Learning (WBL) and Enterprise Education. The blending of the two concepts is justified in that WBL is embedded in the structures, processes, practices and cultures of small family businesses. In such environments learning is largely informal, is passed on and acquired as part of everyday activity. At the point of succession there is a need to adopt an Enterprise Education approach to help re-think the original entrepreneurial skills, attributes and behaviours of the business founder for a new generation, changing environment and set of business circumstances.

http://isbe.org.uk/isbe2017/