Adults’ Learning and Career Temporalities in the Analysis of Professionalisation and Professional Identity Construction

Résumé En

Adults develop experiential learning (Kolb, 1984) in private and professional contexts and situations that are increasingly diverse and mobile. Thus, the related identity construction processes are marked by articulations but also, and mainly, by tensions between on the one hand, the short temporalities defined by urgency and by the acceleration of the requirements for performance and career success, and, on the other hand, the longer temporalities that foster professional or personal development. These individual temporalities intersect with institutional ones that are affected as well by the cult of urgency, of quick solutions (Aubert, 2003), but also by the necessity of sustainability, of durable constructions and of long term institutional programmes (Dubet, 2002). This conflictuality between short term and long term temporal rhythms and perspectives is key to the understanding of the identity construction processes of adults engaged in learning and professionalisation journeys.Within this framework, we will develop a reflection on macro, meso and micro temporal positions, and their articulation to professionalisation. Then, we will explain how our conception of temps vécu, which is lived-time, can clarify the comprehension of the temporal processes that are inscribed in the professional and learning pathways of adults. Finally, three analyses taken from our research work, covering three professional groups, French engineers, physiotherapists and junior community mediators, will identify two distinct processes of temporal construction of professionalisation and reveal their effects on the construction of the professional identities of those three professional groups.