Tag: Adrienne Bird

Adrienne Bird’s Book Published

MERSETA has now published Adrienne Bird’s book, From Sweeper to Engineer. You can access it via the front page of their website or down load it directly from this link.

It is a phenomenal piece of work but it does have an unfinished feel to it.

Darryl Mclean who was largely responsible for Chapter 12 made the point that, “Adrienne would never have published (it) as is.  She got to version 2.0, needed 4.0 before she’d have been happy. She did the baseline research, never fully got through analysis.”

In my last meeting with her, just a few weeks before she died we discussed some of the issues that are currently bedevilling the recognition of learning in and for the workplace. We couldn’t complete the conversation at the time and were going to discuss it at a later date, as I’m sure she would have done with the other people who contributed.

Adrienne Bird’s Book Launched

MERSETA, at long last, launched Adrienne’s book, From Sweeper to Engineer at the beginning of the online inter-chamber conference today, 21 May 2020.

It will be available from next week on the Merseta’s front page. She was working finishing the book until her untimely death in 2019.

Merseta funded the finalisation of the book and a small team of those that worked with her embarked on that process during the latter half of 2019 and finished it in early 2020. I worked with her briefly on the Chapter 12 of the book shortly before she died and I was part of the finalisation team and so had a personal interest in seeing the book published.

I haven’t read the whole book yet but those parts I managed to sample during the editing process are a fascinating read.

The People Framework

She uses a framework or series of lenses to analyse each development through the

last century. She dubbed the it the PEOPLE framework. And people form the first part of the analysis – she uses the stories of people involved to illustrate the evolution of occupational development from the late 19th & early 20th Century through to today’s skills development system.

As Daryl Mclean, noted in his keynote. This framework will be very useful in analysing occupational development needs in this time of great change brought about by issues such digitalisation, 4th Industrial Revolution and the Covid pandemic.