To Orient at Work and Towards Employment: A Difficult Challenge for the Pedagogy of Work

Today, as never before, pedagogy is committed to a tricky and challenging role. To accompany today’s man and woman along the path towards the change between continuity and discontinuity, in a lifelong and lifewide perspective. To provide them with cognitive, emotional and operational means in order to recalibrate and redesign their own projects of development against unknown, sometimes even radical, changes. If we consider today’s political, social and economic conjuncture, which made the work become its Achilles heel, pedagogy of work is entrusted with a far more difficult challenge. That is to make an epistemological reflection and to concretely redesign theories and practices of lifelong learning and guidance to and at work, as Laborem Exercens said talking about “permanent truth” of the humanity. So, the pedagogy of work, in collaboration with other sciences, has to face the difficult gamble, on the one hand, to teach young generations a new culture of work and of “career construction”, in terms of scenarios, knowledge, expertise; on the other, to teach adults to reconstruct and to enhance their own project of professional development, between stasis and change.