Int: Are there experienced workers who give less clear explanations
than others?
A7: Yes, [worker name] (...) It’s because he uses some word that I
don’t know what it means.
All of these apprentices still had things to learn at the end of
their internship. They reported being taught about how to do operations
fairly early during the training, but they were mostly unable
to answer questions about why these operations were required
and had difficulty explaining their role in the production process,
as well as the materials’ properties, and the different ways of operating
according to production variation. Without such knowledge,
it is difficult for them to discriminate when and why one strategy
should be preferred.
Int: [about a steel piece being cut]. This piece will be a part of
what?
A7: I don’t know, I think that is for a client
Int: What damages the sharpness of your knife?
A5: I learned only last week [at the end of the internship] that
when you move food with your knife like that [showing a sliding
movement] it can damage it. The cook saw and told me: ‘‘Hey
don’t do that; it will ruin your knife’’.
In all observed cases, the learning progression followed a
peripheral participation model. That is, apprentices were mostly
assigned to partial tasks before they were asked to do more comprehensive
or global tasks. They learned some operations, but this
barely provided a global perspective because the workers could not
situate their own operations in the overall production flow. This
limited the margin of manoeuvre because apprentices stayed inside
the peripheral task borders and did not experience the full range of
tasks. Even after several months, apprentices reported that they
were not doing all the tasks for which they should have been
trained.
Int.: Are you sometimes assigned to the finishing? [referring to a
production stage normally done at his workplace]
A6: No, they never showed me how to do it. I never had the chance
to try it. It’s hard; I think.
Int: Was he able to do Tartars alone at the end of the training?
EC3: (...) in general we prepared the mixture and then he was able
to build up the plates.
The interviews with experienced workers suggested that limiting
apprentices to peripheral learning was in part due to reluctance
from colleagues and supervisors to let them take on responsibilities.
Several reasons were provided, such as a lack of trust or
because apprentices are unpaid.
EC5: Currently, he’s doing more, we are asking him to do more stuff
(...), but we are 3–4 butchers in the meat department; we want
experience at the front line. For sure, he can’t do as much as we do.
Some experienced workers also tended to assign to apprentices
boring or hard tasks that nobody else wanted to do.
EC3: It’s often the new workers who do that. It’s the ‘‘youngest
law’’; they do boring tasks because other cook no longer wants to
do it. That’s it, it’s simple. Everybody has to pass through it.
In all, learning a new job, even one considered low-skilled, took
time and was not always as easy as it looked. This suggests that
training (showing a worker how to do something) is not learning
(knowing how to do something and how to vary approaches under
different conditions), and that resources other than training are
needed to support learning.