Why is it that so many people are fond of using nouns as adjectives? I think it is probably due to laziness in relation to the correct use of punctuation - usually a missing apostrophe or hyphen. For example, people who work in education often talk about ‘the learner experience’. What do they mean?
They probably wish to express the meaning “the experience (or experiences) that one or more learners is/are exposed to” - in which case, they should probably write one or other of the following expressions:
the learner’s experience (for a single learner having a single experience)
the learner’s experiences (for a single learner having multiple experiences)
the learners’ experience (for a group of learners having a single experience)
the learners’ experiences (for a group of learner having multiple experiences)
On the other hand, we could talk about the ‘learner-experience’ as a single experience that one or more learners are exposed to. The plural form of this composite would now be ‘learner-experiences’ - this would describe multiple experiences that one or more learners have. The problem with this composite is that it does not give any indication of the number of learners involved - one or many? It is interesting to speculate on whether four forms of the composite are needed in order to cover each of the possibilities listed above: (1) learner-experience, (2) learner-experiences, (3) learners-experience and (4) learners-experiences. Interesting!
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