Andragogy or pedagogy as a means to improve the workforce?

Workforce education is driven by learning theories. For centuries, andragogy and pedagogy have been treated as learning theories to guide workforce education. In the workplace in any society, employees are adult workers who need to be equipped with either andragogical theories or pedagogical theories. It is not uncommon to argue that andragogy works best with adult employees in most cases in the workplace. However, pedagogy does have its place to guide workforce education from time to time, due to the fact that adult employees have to go through different learning stages in the workplace. While the authors of this chapter advocate that andragogy promotes self-directed learning in the workplace, successful adult learning professionals should move in and out of those cells as illustrated in Wang’s graph freely. The authors have made an attempt to show different views of andragogy versus pedagogy and how they can be utilized as a means to improve the workforce in a given society