Becoming‐worker: vocational training for workers in aged care

Abstract

Women’s care work sits on the boundary between unpaid work in the private domain and poorly paid, low‐status work in the public sphere. It continues to be a site for the expression of complex, high‐level knowledge and skills, and of ongoing gender oppression. The aged‐care industry is a particularly salient example of such work. It is a low‐status, female‐dominated industry, in which entry‐level workers who do the majority of the care work are the lowest paid of any workers in our society. It relies on a continuing supply of women of low socio‐economic status who bring complex care skills from the private sphere into the workplace, with little recognition of this prior learning and little learning support for the ongoing challenges of working in such a complex workplace. This article explores the issues of learning care work in the aged‐care industry. It is based on long‐term collaborative research with an aged‐care educator, and a research study of vocational learning in an aged‐care organisation in regional Australia. The research aimed to explore the provision of new vocational education and training courses in this highly gender‐segregated workplace. It was found that it was important to consider the different sorts of learning in the two parts of the curriculum: learning in preparatory training and learning in the workplace. New knowledge acquired in vocational education and training was often in conflict with what was learned in the workplace because experienced workers had acquired a different set of knowledge and practices in their predominantly workplace learning. The study revealed the ways in which care workers’ subjectivities were formed within complex negotiations around knowledge and care work. It raised issues about the gendered nature of care work and the reproduction of patterns of gendered subjectivity through institutional practices.