by Catherine Flynn
Working adults returning to school face unique challenges as they navigate their past, present, and future all at once. Like students of any age, they must learn unwritten rules, like how and when to reach out to professors and staff for help (Jack, 2016). Working adults may possess inaccurate ideas about their learning, which they may need to unlearn as they strive toward becoming expert learners who know which learning strategies best suit them (Rose et al., 2014). Fleener’s Futures Adult Learning Theory (FALT) (2021) establishes a current view of working adults’ perceptions of their probable futures. Applying futures methodologies widens this view to include additional possible futures for working adults. Integrating such futures methodologies into learning design, this article concludes with a discussion of how to prepare adult learners for many possible futures. Drawing from a constructivist approach, positing that learners construct knowledge based on experiences and interactions with the world (von Glasersfeld, 2005; Ertmer & Newby, 2013), Figure 1 outlines a conceptual framework. Combining FALT and futures thinking methodologies gnerates learning design recommendations supportive of futures literacy.
Figure 1. The author’s conceptual framework.
Futures Adult Learning Theory
Futures literacy, individuals’ ability to imagine the future and engage with scenarios, is a vital skill for the twenty-first century (UNESCO, n.d.). Futures Adult Learning Theory (FALT) (Fleener, 2021) offers an adult learning theory foundation for this skill. FALT describes three common patterns of how adults conceptualize the future. These patterns may support individuals’ progress toward future personal and professional goals:
- A contingent orientation focuses on predicting the most probable future using available data.
- An optimization orientation generates multiple possible moves to control for the best possible preferred future.
- An emergent orientation embraces unpredictability and change to prepare for multiple possible futures.
People do not have one way of making meaning of the future. They combine elements of these three patterns in service of their goals. A contingent orientation helps people predict an event’s outcome using available information. For example, one might assess a company restructuring’s impact on their job duties. An optimization orientation helps when selecting the best path to take, such as determining whether to stay in one’s current job or accepting a promotion. In unpredictable situations in which change is abundant but data are scarce, an emergent orientation is useful. Think of school administrators trying to predict the impact of COVID-19 on student learning early in the pandemic. Successful adult learners understand how to alternate between these three ways of thinking about the future. They do this based on the information they have and their specific goals.
Factors Impacting Learner Choices
Adult learners face many decisions while pursuing an educational program while working. The choices vary in potential impact. A simple decision with low impact is when to post in the online discussion forum. More impactful is making the choice to stay in school despite challenges. The context of a learner’s past, present, and future further complicates their decision-making. The learning sciences introduce the concept of systematic learner variability. People’s backgrounds, needs, and preferences affect how they learn (Rose, Rouhani, & Fischer, 2013). Individuals’ professional development strategies reflect learning’s personalized nature. Many working adult learners take a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach, combining their education and career advancement using available resources.
Mapping the Past, Present, and Future of Working Adult Learners
The Futures Triangle, developed by Inayatullah (2002, 2008), explains the dynamics of change and provides a first step for this author’s exploration of one possible future for working adult learners shown in Figure 2. The Futures Triangle compares the push of the present, the weight of the past, and the pull of the future. The current push towards flexible career pathways contrasts with less flexible 9-5 office jobs rooted in traditional work methods. The future could hold the possibility of customized career highways. These career highways would fast-track people’s transferable skills, opening up new opportunities they might not have considered.
The push of the present is promising. Ed tech and workforce development organizations envision a future where resumes are obsolete. Instead, universities and companies would work together to focus on people’s skill strengths (deLaski, 2019; Hall et al., 2023; World Economic Forum, 2021). In this possible future, organizations would hire individuals for their unique human skills, such as creativity and problem-solving (Aoun, 2017). Working adult students in this future would be well aware of their skills and could present them to employers across sectors (Weise, 2020). Collaboration between humans and machines would be strategic, with AI augmenting workers as needed (Cantrell et al., 2022). This future would offer more flexibility, with employees not tied to a specific location or a 40-hour work week. Work would become a site for deliberate human development, with leaders and employees coaching each other toward a shared mission (Kegan & Lahey, 2016).
Current workforce reform efforts aim to reshape the traditional hiring process, reflecting the pull of the present. Historically, the college degree has indicated workforce readiness (NACE, n.d.) and interviews have assessed culture fit (SHRM, n.d.). Emerging practices are leaning towards skills-based hiring. This approach could level the playing field by framing jobs in terms of key skills required and evaluating employees based on their strongest skills (OSN, 2022). Instead of encouraging employees to climb a linear career ladder, some organizations support employee development by offering different career pathway options. This approach allows employees to try out different roles and develop new skills (Westerman & Lundberg, 2023). More flexible work arrangements, like working from home, have emerged due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, movements advocating for more traditional workforce practices are pushing for employees to return to the office, creating barriers to achieving this future vision (Wigert & Agrawal, 2022), representing the weight of the past.
Figure 2. World of earning and learning futures triangle
The Futures Triangle model sketches a future world of intertwined earning and learning. The past’s prescriptive career roads mandated at a societal level and the present’s individually forged career paths cobbled together out of necessity, give way to systematically engineered career highways of the future that provide support and structure but maximize individual autonomy in personal and professional learning. A shift from resumes to skills-based hiring characterizes this future with human development taking center stage.
Deepening the Future of Working Adult Learners With Causal Layered Analysis
After exploring tensions between the past, present, and future with the Futures Triangle model, causal layered analysis (CLA) can unpack myths and worldviews underlying possible futures for working adult learners. CLA surfaces alternative scenarios and implications (Inayatullah, 1998). This will be valuable for recommending learning design strategies to build adult learners’ futures literacy as delineated in this article’s conceptual framework.
CLA examines four dimensions: a) the litany or day-to-day future, b) systemic causes, c) the culture or worldview, and d) myth or the metaphor. By investigating the possibilities of the future from the surface-level headlines to the foundational, unconscious stories, more nuanced solutions and understandings emerge. Table 1 describes how CLA deepens understanding of possible futures for working adult learners. Current issues facing adult students balancing work, life, and academics are investigated in depth.
The Litany level reveals that American adults are not finishing their postsecondary programs because the design of higher education systems does not meet their needs. As suggested by Systemic causes, higher education should offer more support like childcare, financing options, and transfer credit to address the root cause. This results in a predominant Worldview that working adult learners must accept higher education as it is to achieve their career goals. An underlying central metaphor that working adult learners must “carve their own path” in universities not necessarily designed for them prevails, according to the Myth/metaphor level. An alternative metaphor emerges as a solution, in which learners may instead “program their own route.” Like how drivers enter their destination in a car’s GPS along with any relevant parameters (pit stops, avoiding tolls, etc.), this reimagined future world of learning and earning helps people integrate their professional and academic lives in service of the strengths they already bring to the table.
From the chain of solutions generated from CLA, a pair of learning design strategies arises to help working adult students “program their own route”: a) to teach them how to use horizon scanning to detect relevant opportunities and threats for their personal and professional growth to optimize their route and b) to teach them how to use scenario planning to explore possible futures and anticipate any additional resources they will need on their learning journey.
Table 1. Causal layered analysis for the future of working adult learners
| Causal Layered Analysis Level | Adult Learners |
| Litany | Problem: An increasing number of American adults leave postsecondary education without earning a postsecondary credential (Causey et al., 2022)
Solution: Universities should outreach students who have not completed programs and encourage degree completion |
| Systemic causes | Audit on causes of competing priorities: Universities are not designed for working adults, access to supports like childcare, program affordability, financing, availability of credit for prior learning, ability to transfer credits from other programs (LeBlanc, 2022; Levine & Van Pelt, 2021)
Solution: Higher education must offer more student supports |
| Worldview | Worldview: Working adult learners must make do with prescribed academic paths to support career advancement.
Solution: Empower working adults to direct their studies Solution: Connect education and employment ecosystems in service of working adult learners |
| Myth/metaphor | Myth/metaphor: “Carve your own path.”
Solution: “Program your own route.” |
Futures Literacy Learning Design Strategies for Adult Educators
Informed by the output of the Futures Triangle and CLA exercises, this section explores two futures thinking approaches adult educators might employ to help learners practice switching between the three patterns of relating to the future described by FALT (Fleener, 2021). These recommendations respond to one highly plausible future explored by this author, but they may support working adult learners in imagining their own preferred futures.
Scan the Horizon for Opportunities and Threats Via Emerging Issues Analysis
Futures literacy helps learners interrogate the root causes of a challenge to shift their mindset. Another futures thinking technique, emerging issues analysis, can help people constructively explore recent events and draw inferences about possible implications. Graham Molitor (1977), a futurist who originated this methodology, initially described its application in the public policy domain to project future trends based on current events and key players. Emerging issues analysis is a tool to see connections between events that do not appear connected on the surface and anticipate possible futures (Cook et al., 2014). Adult learners can retain control amidst challenging circumstances through this critical consumption of the world around them. This approach can help them determine how much information is available to them and reflect on how unpredictable they perceive the current situation, informing which FALT pattern might be most applicable to their circumstances.
Apart from larger contexts like public policy and corporate strategy, individual adult learners can apply emerging issues analysis to survey elements of their world today and forecast tomorrow’s possibilities. Just as literary critics closely read a passage from a book and distill themes and subtext, people may read between the lines of their life narratives using emerging issues analysis. For example, an adult learner can collect data from recent events at their workplace: new hires, recent departures, reorganizations, and books that everyone is reading, and start to divine patterns about where the company is headed and how they might strategize their learning in the educational program they are currently pursuing outside of their working hours.
Discover Possible Futures Through Scenario Planning
Adult learners navigate a complicated reality, perpetually balancing priorities and constantly strapped for time. Time perspective, or people’s perceptual understanding of their past, present, and future, is a crucial driver of human behavior (Kauffman & Husman, 2004). Special attention must be paid to how adult learners “budget” their study time, weighing cost-benefit in the moment and projecting a future return on investment as they decide which tasks to complete and how much time to give them. Adult educators incorporating futures literacy activities informed by FALT in their curricula should integrate these exercises within regular learning assignments rather than relegate them to a separate track, lest they be overshadowed by other matters perceived as a higher priority.
A futures thinking technique called scenario planning helps adults exploit uncertainty to their advantage and determine actionable steps as they simulate realities of hypothetical futures. A tool for people at both an individual and group level to think strategically about the future, scenario planning lets them methodically and creatively interpret a range of inputs to possible futures and develop a plan to prepare accordingly (Cook et al., 2014). Guided by emergent anticipatory logics, companies use scenario planning to inform their corporate strategy by identifying different variables, or drivers, that could shape their organization’s future. Exploring the possible futures presented by different combinations of drivers, working adult learners can develop their own personal strategic plans for earning and learning that anticipate challenges and optimize opportunities.
Conclusion
Respecting learners’ autonomy is a vital ethical consideration in adult education (Shi, 2017). The author mapped and deepened one highly plausible future for working adult learners but does not take the stance that this is the only possible future. Incorporating futures methodologies intentionally into learning design centers the autonomy of working adult learners by equipping them for success in many possible futures.
By working more closely together, employers and education institutions can adopt skill-based hiring and development practices to put people and their individual strengths first. It is through this collaboration that the pull of the future “customized route” can outweigh traditional career practices and current approaches that are more standardized. Juggling several life priorities, working adult learners can benefit from the intentional application of futures thinking as described in FALT to steady the course and keep their eyes open to all the possibilities awaiting them in life, learning, and livelihood.
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