ASEM Education and Research Hub for Lifelong Learning (ASEM-LLL Hub)

In line with ASEM guiding principles, the ASEM Education and Research Hub for Lifelong Learning (ASEM-LLL Hub) was established in 2005 to strengthen relationships, through dialogue and cooperation, between educational researchers, practitioners, and policy makers working in the two regions. It is constituted as an official specialist network of Asian and European universities, working and learning collaboratively on comparative lifelong learning research. 

The LLAKES Research Centre has contributed significantly to the development of the ASEM-LLL Hub since its inception. Professor Andy Green and Professor Karen Evans have played leading roles in two of the five research networks: Research Network 4 (RN4) – Strategies for Lifelong Learning, and Research Network 2 (RN2) – Workplace Learning and Competence Development, respectively. 

Karen Evans is leading a renewed phase of research collaboration, from 2019, in association with the LLAKES Centre. To mark this new phase, the Research Network on Workplace Learning (RN2) has held a network conference ‘Workplace Learning in the Digital Era’ in the University of Innsbruck between 4th and 6th November 2019.

The Network is aiming to develop frameworks for understanding how opportunities for lifelong learning, including professional and personal development at work, are distributed, structured, experienced and used. Through exchange of information, workshop discussions and joint studies of how workplace learning is provided, practised and understood in Asian and European countries, RN2 is building up a shared body of knowledge that is empirically based, contextualised and theoretically informed.

The aim of the November 2019 network conference has been to review progress and to advance specific lines of inquiry, in advance of the relaunch of the ASEM LLL Hub later this year. It builds on the Bernd Rode prize, awarded to the Research Network in 2019 for ‘Project Excellence’.
The network focused on three themes in 2020: 

1.   Employer engagement in vocational skills development and lifelong learning for young people; 

2.   Global learning spaces: understanding learning in global work; 

3.   professional identity of young adults who learn in the workplace as part of their vocational education. The meeting has developed the agenda for the network’s activities over the next 2 years. 

Between 2020 and 2023, the Workplace Learning Network is carrying out a new inquiry into VET Resilience in the Pandemic. Partners from Asia (Japan, Singapore, Thailand) are cooperating with partners in Europe (Austria/Germany, France, Latvia, Lithuania, UK) to review how the pandemic is affecting provision for vocational education and training and conditions for vocational learning. An ecosystems approach is used to analyse changes according to business settings, modes of labour, structures of jobs; policy and institutional frameworks; systems for skills formation.

Funders: the Asia Europe Foundation, the ASEM Education Directorate, Foreign Ministries and Universities of participating national teams