Description
In today’s rapidly changing world Life Long Learning provides a very important strategy, tactics and practice for remaining competitive and for the growth of nations, as well as for commercial and non-commercial organizations and individuals. A study on how individuals and business organizations cope with the situation through continuing learning (“CL”) or lifelong learning (“LLL”) was carried out for Hong Kong in this research. In this research both the perspectives of the employees and employers were studied to find out how they have been practicing continuing learning (“CL”) or lifelong learning (“LLL”) to cope with the rapid changes of circumstances. There are four research questions : 1. What are the perspectives of employers concerning the provision of CL/LLL to employees? 2. How do the employers perceive and manage their organizational learning? 3. For the employees what is their hierarchy of needs in their pursuit of CL/LLL? 4. How do ordinary people in business and in society perceive CL/LLL? How do they distinguish between them? Maslow’s five basic needs model was used, supplemented by Nohria, Groysberg & Lee ‘s (2008) model. The findings: for Q1 is that the employers are very pragmatic and stringent in the provision of CL/LLL to employees; for Q2 is that the employers are not too conversant with the theoretical concepts for organization learning, and they usually do not maintain a systematic archive for organization knowledge; for Q3 is that in the motivation factors of self-esteem and self-actualization in Maslow’s model ranked highest, in the employees’ pursuit of CL/LLL and some of the employees showed that they had more than one motivation factors at the same time; and for Q4 is that for most people CL are for serious matters related to job and career development only, and LLL is for other less formal or serious matter beyond CL.