Difference Between Teaching and Learning

A fuller appreciation of the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge is key to understanding the role of managers and their education. Unlike blue-collar skills, which are generally predetermined, repetitive, mechanical, and codified in manuals, administrative decision making is a competence borne out of a variable and difficult-to-predict macroenvironment alongside the interaction of numerous interrelated institution- specific factors. Blue-collar skills are predicated on available explicit knowledge; white-collar skills are predicted mainly on the less-than-visible tacit experience. Explicit knowledge can be taught while tacit knowledge is best learned. The distinction is palpable. Teaching is instruction received. Learning is instruction acquired out of an abstracted process of critical reflection, reasoned deduction, and applied action, the evidential base for which is OM. To teach decision making without reference to institution-specific OM and specifically tacit knowledge is short-handing management.

There are at least five reasons for OM’s importance to institutions, the first being the way modern industry and commerce has structured its workforce. Whereas individuals could once chalk up one or two different jobs in a working lifetime (this was still evident in the 1960s), average job tenure, even at management level, is now less than 5 years in many developed countries (Mintel, 2004). Employees’ experience is a factor of production that has been paid for at great expense, yet, because employers make little effort to capture it, it is readily discarded in the backwash of the biggest change in workplace practice for more than a century: the actively encouraged flexible labor market.