The expanding diversity in research topics and approaches should not be regarded as a weakness of HRD but as a rich landscape for sense making and meaning. For the advancement of HRD expertise, research should reflect the diversified field of HRD practice. This paper offers such reflection on the diversity of HRD research from a European perspective, focusing particularly on work from the Netherlands and Belgium.

More than ten years ago, in their study on the characteristics of HRD research in Europe, Lowyck and Elen (1994) came to the conclusion that this research landscape offered a scattered view. The majority of research projects followed an explorative and descriptive approach. The orientation showed a strong inclination towards instructional psychology and course design. The authors pointed out that themes referring to learning to learn, self-regulation, meta-cognition and collaborative learning were almost absent. In addition, questions referring to the coherence between characteristics of the organising of work and learning in the workplace received relatively low attention, as did the various roles of HRD professionals.