7LEAD008W Learning For Career Development Assessment University of Westminster

Assessment Summary

A case study chosen by yourself – you will need to find or construct an organisational situation to analyse. This may be a real organisational issue/ problem/ context from your own experience or from secondary sources like books, academic/ professional journals, corporate documentation, newspapers, internet, film, TV, drama etc. Alternatively, you may elect to construct your own case from your own experience,or carry out a little bit of research on an organisation to which you have access. More guidance on what constitutes a good case for analysis will be discussed in class as the module progresses.

Your Task

In this assessment you are required to undertake preparatory work for a case study analysis in the Learning and Development (L&D) area. The work will comprise the initial stages of a critical analysis of an organisational situation/narrative either from your own experience or from secondary sources like books, learned journals, corporate documentation, newspapers, internet, film or TV programme etc. 

The purpose of the analysis is to provide you with an opportunity to apply some of the ideas and concepts discussed in the literature and/or in class in making a sophisticated diagnostic analysis of the chosen organisational situation.

For this assessment, you need to find and describe an organisational situation which lends itself to analysis using models and concepts from the literature:

(i) Finding your situation. It needs to be of sufficient complexity to allow for an in-depth (but not overlong) analysis. This might be an issue, a narrative, a problem, a relationship, an event or series of connected events.

(ii) Describing your situation. Enough to orientate the reader without giving excessive detail.

Finally, decide upon a working title. Your title, and by implication your focus of attention, should largely reside within one of the following key areas of theory:
•    Classic theories of learning (choose one theory, such as Bandura’s social learning theory to focus on)
•    L&D for leadership and management
•    Digital learning
•    Engagement

Furthermore, you should situate your case study within the relevant business context, such as leadership or change management. Please ensure that your final reference list contains ONLY those sources you have consulted and referred to as in text citations in your report.

Constructing and analysing a ‘case’ requires skills of understanding the relevance of the abstract to the particular. It’s about giving some conceptual order to complexity, contradiction and ambiguity. It’s also seeing the value of theory for giving a more textured, multi-layered view of the world and going beyond surface events to understand the deeper social forces which drive them. For most of us this requires practice. But it is a skill worth acquiring because it is increasingly needed the higher you go in any professional-managerial sphere of life the more you will need to ability to ‘read’ human situations apply abstract ideas to particular experience.

Learning Outcomes Addressed:

LO3: Apply the skills of strategic thinking; be able to envisage options and consequences, select a course of action and challenge the status quo.