This thesis examines retail bank workers’ informal learning practices in a major Canadian bank under conditions of rapid organizational restructuring and ongoing automation during the mid- to late-1990s. Based on a national survey of bank workers’ learning practices and ethnographic fieldwork in three branches, the thesis’s key findings are as follows. The poor learning environment in the branches, combined with the bank’s adoption of a formal study training policy, are at odds with both empirical surveys of adults’ informal learning practices and with adults’ preferred ways of learning at work – which are predominantly informal in nature. There is also evidence that informal on-the-job learning is being displaced and crowded out by work-related formal study via the “substitution effect” (Livingstone, 2010, 424). The heavy formal study pressures are heightened by the lack of trade unions and job security, and the vulnerable position of many women workers, particularly those without higher education.

This thesis examines retail bank workers’ informal learning practices in a major Canadian bank under conditions of rapid organizational restructuring and ongoing automation during the mid- to late-1990s. Based on a national survey of bank workers’ learning practices and ethnographic fieldwork in three branches, the thesis’s key findings are as follows. The poor learning environment in the branches, combined with the bank’s adoption of a formal study training policy, are at odds with both empirical surveys of adults’ informal learning practices and with adults’ preferred ways of learning at work – which are predominantly informal in nature. There is also evidence that informal on-the-job learning is being displaced and crowded out by work-related formal study via the “substitution effect” (Livingstone, 2010, 424). The heavy formal study pressures are heightened by the lack of trade unions and job security, and the vulnerable position of many women workers, particularly those without higher education.