Situated information seeking for learning: A case study of engineering workplace cognition among cybersecurity professionals

Workforce development in engineering is a high priority to keep pace with innovation and change within engineering disciplines and also within organizations. Increasingly, workforce development requires more retraining and retooling of employees than ever before as information technology has accelerated both the creation of a new body of knowledge and also the skills required to perform the work. In this paper we present a field study of a highly dynamic workplace - a cybersecurity firm - undertaken to better understand how engineers keep up with the pace of knowledge that is needed for their work. Fifteen professionals, with a wide range of experience and educational background, were interviewed. Data were analyzed iteratively and interpretively. The findings from the study suggest that over time some well-defined ways of learning had developed in the workplace we studied. These learning practices combined in-person and online interactions and resources. We also found that learning was triggered largely by the need to solve a problem or by the interests of the engineers to learn more in order to be prepared for new knowledge in the field. Depending on the problem they faced, the engineers mapped the requirements of what was needed to solve the problem, identified the resources that were available, and then selected the optimal resource. Often, as is common with problem solving, our participants had to try out multiple options. Theoretically, our study contributes by integrating an information seeking perspective with situated cognition to inform future studies of learning in information rich engineering and technology workplaces.