Enterprise Systems Education: How “Not Learning” Happens

Enterprise systems education poses a challenge in both industry and academic settings, and failure to successfully train end-users can result in significant monetary losses for companies. Adopting a participant observation methodology this study investigates the “not-learning” experiences of students in an academic context. Our findings suggest that “not-learning” is related to procedures (where to click?), processes (what is going to change, and where?) and integrative (how to make sense of the big picture?) aspects of enterprise systems. We contend that industry end-users face many similar learning blocks.
Simple knowledge typologies (e.g., system-specific, process-specific) that form the foundation for much enterprise systems training research may not capture some important nuances of learning. We propose a framework that separates content areas from types of knowledge-in-use, and helps in understanding learning failures in more detail.