Technological change and continuing education participation

Lifelong learning is seen as a necessity in today’s world of work. This view is based on the assumption that employees need to remain “up to speed” in order to be able to cope with the changes to work processes and tools that are being brought about by technological change. However, less is currently known about the extent to which continuing education is really being deployed in companies as a means of reacting to technological change and about which groups actually attend courses. In this article, we use data from the German Educational Panel Study (NEPS) adult cohort to investigate the influence exerted on participation in continuing education by individual, occupational, company structure and task-related factors.