Adult educators are key intermediaries of lifelong learning. Their competences are vital for effectively delivering courses, and improving their level of professionalism is a constant aim of European LLL policies (Egetenmeyer and Bettinger, 2014). However, comparatively little is known about how actually adult educators achieve their required broad set of professional competences (Lattke, 2017; Milana, Andersson, Farinelli, Gross, Jõgi, Köpsén and Larson, 2010; Sgier and Lattke, 2012). Moreover, they require often specific competences required for catering to specific groups of learners, for example, in Adult Basic Education or in training measures for the long-term unemployed. They need to read their clients’ needs and provide effectively help to overcome learning barriers. In most countries only a minority of adult educators hold a specific university degree in andragogy, yet, professionals differ widely in their educational backgrounds and acquire their competences from a broad variety of mainly non-formal courses or by learning-by-doing. In particular, the role of day-to-day workplace learning and the mutual role of individual and organisational bounded agency for setting up successful learning processes are under-researched. Adult educators are expected to provide their services independently, observing professional standards and serving the interest of their clients thereby sharing key features of other educational professions. Organisations broadly rely on the educators’ ability to work independently and to observe reliably set rules and organisational requirements. Key differences compared to school teachers include the much weaker role of standardised qualifications as an entrance requirement, the broad absence of standard employment contracts and the frequency of precarious employment conditions. The paper analyses individual accounts of workplace learning of 30 adult educators from 8 adult education organisations in 4 countries (AT, IT, SK, UK). These individual experiences of day-to-day workplace learning are put into the context of an organisation’s approaches to work organisation and HRM measures. The organisations chosen represent different sub-sectors of adult education.

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