Determinants of Quality Coping and Knowledge Acquisition in Professional Work and Academic Study Systemic Interaction

Abstract: In Ghana, most universities have Graduate programs that are designed for working persons and delivered on weekdays’ evenings and/or weekends, using the hybrid system, which enables a “teaching-learning” roll-over between face-to-face and virtual platforms. Despite the usefulness of such hybrid platform, its influence in (re)orienting the mental modes of working students towards quality knowledge acquisition remains unexplored. It is thus evident that discussion on students’ simultaneous engaging in professional work and academic activities on the factors that determine the quality of their knowledge acquisition capabilities, and the coping mechanism they use are mainly disjointed, which situation manifest a knowledge gap. Thus, the purpose of this paper was to identify factors that determine the quality of professional workers’ coping capabilities and knowledge acquisition when they simultaneously engage in professional work and academic activities. This is motivated by the observation that professional workers’ simultaneous engagement in work and schooling can have an adverse effect on the quality of their educational experiences, stress levels and mental health, all of which can lengthen the degree of their completion time, as well as increase the likelihood of their dropping out. This observation has resulted in policymakers and managers of tertiary educational institutions looking at ways for educational structural redesign to provide flexible schooling options to professional workers who combine work with school so as to satisfy their anticipatory self-development and/or work experience enhancement without quitting their jobs. Building on the notion that an individual’s self-regulation system takes shape and gets transformed over lengthy periods of time, with its problems and potentials being understood only against its own history, the argument that an individual’s mode of mental mode may result in his/her (in)ability to accurately cope with the dynamics of work and study leading to the acquisition of quality knowledge is explored, as underlined by the following question; What are the determining factors used by professional workers for quality coping and knowledge acquisition in their professional work and academic study systemic interaction? This study is methodologically guided by the systemic structural activity theorization that the discovery of goals is essential to true activity that can be transformed into contradictions which may influence a person’s metal mode as well as expand into a qualitatively new organizational activity structure and systemic activity contexts. It was also encapsulated in the well-established knowledge that activities of individuals are realized by goal-directed actions, informed either by mental or motor conscious processes, and the notion that one cannot perform a complex motor task without significant mental effort and concentration. Thus, the principal component analytical approach is used to evaluate factors influencing the Work-Academic and coping interactive mechanisms used by the professional workers. This study is the first to be carried out in the education sector in Ghana and the findings will provide useful insight in the systemic design and structuring of hybridized teaching-learning systems (entailing a combination of face-to-face and virtual platforms) to enable quality transitions in the coping and wellness of working students towards knowledge acquisition

Keywords: Professional Work, Working Students, Academic Study, Quality Knowledge Acquisition, Quality Coping, Ghana

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1006634

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