Is HRD the future of
andragogy?
CAE 213 Intro to Adult Education
Toccoa Falls College
Andragogy: AE or HRD?
• The individual
controls his or her
own learning.
Evaluation
Need Assessment
• The organization controls
the worker’s learning.
Learning
Plan
HRD
• Human Resource Development, to be
strategic and useful, must position itself as
a strategic partner within the
organizational structure; taking on the
same level of importance as finance,
production, and marketing.
• Firms expect a return on the money
invested in their employees.
HRD
• Human Resource Development in nonprofit organizations equips learners to
contribute meaningfully to organizational
goals that are essential for organizational
survival.
• HRD is first and foremost concerned with
maintaining and/or improving performance
at the organizational, process, and
individual levels.
What is the key difference?
Evaluation
Need Assessment
Learning
Plan
• In AE, the learner
controls his or her
learning.
• In HRD, the
organization controls
the learning.
Need Assessment
Evaluation
HRD  
Learning
Plan
• When the individual’s needs are consistent with
the organization’s needs, there is not tension.
• When the organization’s and the individual’s
needs are not congruent, the organization will
require learning and a tension will exist between
the individual learner and the organization.
• Effective HRD professionals have the ability to
find an optimum balance in each situation.
Theoretical Foundations
of Adult Learning
• There are four phases:
1. Need assessment – determine what
learning is needed.
2. Strategy creation – Create a strategy and
recruit resources to achieve goals.
3. Implementation – Implement the learning
strategy.
4. Evaluation – Assess the attainment of
the goal and the process of reaching it.
Need Assessment
Evaluation
  AE
Learning
Plan
• The determining of learner need tends to be
reactive rather than strategic in AE.
• Learning professionals are portrayed as reacting
to the needs expressed by learners.
This assumes that:
• The learner is fully aware of his or her need.
• The learner can accurately access specific need.
• The learner will initiate learning.
• The learner will maintain a commitment to
learning.
Need Assessment
Evaluation
 AE ---- HRD 
Learning
Plan
Brookfield (1986) observes,
“To take learners’ definitions of need as always
determining appropriate practice is to cast the
facilitator as a technician within the consumer
mode. It is to remove from the facilitator all
professional judgment and to turn him or her into
a “knee-jerk” satisfier of consumer needs.
Education becomes one giant department store
in which facilitators are providers of whatever
learning (consumers) believe will make them
happy” (p. 97).
Need Assessment
Evaluation
AE balances with HRD
Learning
Plan
1. Need – Engage learners to gain high
motivation. Do not expect self-reporting of
needs to be accurate for either the individual or
the organization.
2. Create – Engage learners to gain higher validity
in the selected learning strategies.
3. Implement – Engage learner to better mediate
the actual learning.
4. Evaluate – Engage learners to gain higher selfreflection and integration of knowledge and
expertise.
The Future of Andragogy?
• AE and HRD will continue to develop.
• Control in AE will rest in the hands of the
individual. The individual will seek to
become literate, personally transformed,
spiritually empowered, and socially
emancipated.
• Control in HRD will rest in the hands of the
organization which will develop employees
for organizational success.
The Future of Andragogy?
1. The discipline needs a more clearly
defined theory. [Page 4 is a good
beginning.]
2. The discipline needs to develop clear
measurements for key processes and
elements.
3. The discipline needs empirically
demonstrative case studies of
techniques that produce better
outcomes.