This is the final report from a three-year program of research investigating the role of vocational education and training (VET) in workforce development. The research focuses on meat processing and child care, both of which are characterised by low-skill entry points to the labour market. The author pulls together the key themes emerging from the…

Teacher selection, retention, and evaluation form a contentious policy knot. This paper: (1) reviews the recent history of teacher labor markets; (2) describes the teacher selection, preparation and retention policies of three countries that successfully reformed their systems; (3) proposes a different theoretical guide; and (4) reviews key…

Community colleges comprise the largest single sector of the US higher education network. Forty percent of undergraduates attend one of our two-year schools. Some estimates suggest that, since the turnover is quicker than on four-year campuses, two-thirds of the students who attend a college at all attend a community college. For many of those…

Since the late 1980s, the production of PhDs has become a much-discussed political issue, and the reforms and tensions surrounding this category of graduates have gathered momentum. Vocational fields and the contents of PhD education have evolved everywhere, partly because, as academic competition has intensified, the American "graduate…

For the past two decades, most immigrants who arrived in the advanced nations of the western world originated in less advanced countries of the third world. One of the main barriers to their economic integration, as viewed in the public circles of host nations, is the lack of recognition of their educational credentials based on which the…

The European Union is deeply concerned with how education responds to the needs of society. The purpose of this article is to analyze the transition from the University education to the labour market for the IT specialists in the city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. In order to achieve this, a survey was conducted among the recent graduates in the IT…

The notion of localism and decentralization in national policy has come increasingly to the fore in recent years. The national succession planning strategy for headteachers in England introduced by the National College for School Leadership promoted "local solutions for a national challenge". This article deals with some aspects of the…

Asians are now the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States. And although disproportionately more likely to live in Western states, some are settling in nontraditional host communities. Focusing on one such instance in southeast Georgia, the present ethnographic case study considers a poultry processing plant's decision to recruit dozens…

At this moment, roughly 12 million Americans are unable to find work, with more than 40 percent of that number unemployed for six months or more. At the same time, current estimates put the number of job vacancies in this country at 3 million per month. The most popular explanation for this apparent paradox, the one put forth by former President…

Psychometrically sound evaluation measures are vital for examining the contribution of professional training to organizational success in a reliable manner. As training evaluations tend to be both time-consuming and labor-intensive, there is an increasing demand for economic evaluation inventories. Simultaneously, evaluation measures have to meet…

The one-child policy is the only fundamental policy in China that has been kept intact for over three decades, despite the vast socioeconomic changes emerging during this period. While the pressure of population growth still exists, the current control-focused policy has aroused problems and damages that tend to offset its gains. The legitimacy of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ideals and activities of the nineteenth century Welsh industrialist and reformer Robert Owen (1771-1858), and how they informed modern human resource development (HRD) concepts and practices and provided evidence of Owen as a HRD pioneer. Design/methodology/approach: Historiography provided…

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative research study was to explore the requirements of leading in a global environment as perceived by the leaders participating in this study as well as the way these leaders learn and develop their global mindset. Design/methodology/approach: The research methodology informed by social constructivism included…

The supply of student talent is now taking on an increasingly global dimension and this has extended the breadth of university-industry interaction. Set in the context of a rapidly growing international student market, knowledge transfer between academia and business through global student talent supply is an emerging practice. This paper…

The discourse of disengagement has achieved ascendancy just as young people's employment prospects have declined--in many countries to crisis levels. Conceptualising and interpreting young people's non-participation in dominant modes of education, training and employment has been a preoccupation of academics, policymakers and journalists. This…