How Work Placement Is Able to Provide the Students with a Sense of Awareness of the Existent Culture - Research Paper Example

Work placement programs have been defined by Coco (2000) as “planned transition from the classroom to the job, and are a natural bridge between college and the work world.” The proliferation of work placement is attributed to the need for individual workers to learn to adapt which entails the need to learn new concepts, strategies and practices that assist in greater integration of work and learning and, as Boud and Middleton (2003) suggested, it may be necessary to look beyond traditional education and training practices to achieve this integration. Boud further proposes that educators must begin to consider what the limits of their traditional educational practices are in the context of learning at work and what, if any, new practices can be invoked to assist this process. He suggests that the conventional separation of learning and work is breaking down and that the practice is grounded at a very deep level in a set of assumptions about the separateness of learning and work. This means that there appears to be a gap and that the fact is that educational institutions are separated physically and conceptually from the points of application of learning (Illeris, 2004). As such, there is a need to find ways of bridging this gap (Mandilaras, 2004).

As a result, many educational institutions have undertaken to implement work placement as part of the learning process of the students (Cheetham and Chivers, 2001). This phase is seen as the initial step towards career development (Billett, 2009). Considering the fact that work placements provide an avenue for the learners' to get a sense of what they will be facing in the future absent the threat of dismissal or unemployment and with the added incentive of learning for education's sake, work placements appear to be mechanisms aimed at ascertaining the well-being of the students (Neill and Mulholland, 2003).
This report aims to:
 illustrate how students who undertake work placements perform under a setting wherein they are able to put theory into practice
 show how work placement is able to provide the students with a sense of awareness of the existent culture in their chosen field.