Knowing more fully what constitutes learning across working life and how negotiating transitions might be best supported and guided is important for working age adults, their workplaces, and communities. Central to that negotiation are the experiences that adults are afforded and how they engage with them. Drawing on an investigation of adult Australians’ worklife learning, the concept of educative experiences emerged as an explanatory basis for elaborating, understanding and supporting that learning. That is, the range of experiences that are educative in so far as they afford opportunities, support participation, and guide and augment that learning. These experiences are more expansive and inclusive than those afforded through (lifelong) educational programs and being taught or facilitated by others as intentional learning experiences. Together, with the concept of personal curriculum (see Billett, S. (this volume). Learning across working life: A product of ‘personal curriculum’. In S. Billett, H. Salling-Olesen & L. Filliettaz (Eds.), Sustaining employability through work-life learning: Practices and policies. Springer Nature), these explanatory bases offer ways to capture and understand what constitutes learning through experiences across working life. The aim of this chapter is to reappraise what constitutes lifelong education, advance a broader concept and position it more inclusively with the societal affordances that support and guide adults learning and development, drawing on data from 66 worklife history interviews. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
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