This big state office (with 1063 employees) was located in a big city of Spain and the contacted department was specialized in informatics. From the 7 employees in that department, 4 were part of the piloting trial phase of TRAILER (the dropout registered was one of the highest). Typically the employees had a degree and their age was between 26 and 40 years old.
The employees showed the lowest score of prior recognition of informal learning (IL) and even though this recognition improved after the pilots, it was still one of the lowest. The activities they considered more important in developing IL were “Reading”, “Trial and error” and “Searching in the Internet”. In general, comparing with other cases, they show higher level of agreement relatively to the need for IL activities in: “learn to perform particular tasks”, “developing a deeper knowledge” and “amusing myself”.
During the first piloting phase – the learner perspective, the few employees who started, finished the piloting (showed a percentage of 100% of active users), but few competences were added per informal learning activities (ILA’s), in average only 1. But 82% of actions were completed on both platforms (an average of 10 ILA’s per user). However, the great majority of the collected activities were not made public.
This group of employees considered the tool’s usability was not very good, however they considered its usefulness high.
The person who acted as employer, the Director of the Web Environment Services, considered that the TRAILER tool could act as a facilitator in selection and identification of new skills processes; he also stated that participants had the opportunity to reflect on what they know and how they have learned it, which represents an unusual but necessary process.