Interviews with executives in 12 companies on new worker knowledge and skills indicated that entry workers need to have greater communication skills, team-oriented skills, cross-functional/interdisciplinary perspective, receptivity to change, and intercultural awareness. (SK)

Examines a work initiative that moved welfare recipients into jobs as nurse assistants at a geriatric facility. The women's stories describe a welfare-to-work program in practice and illustrate how and why earnest efforts to mediate poverty resulted instead in the continued marginalization and stigmatization of poor people. (RJM)

The World Employment Report indicates that the number of unemployed and underemployed workers around the world has never been higher and will grow as a result of the financial crisis in Asia and other parts of the world. Worker training provides an effective means to resolve this problem. (Author/JOW)

Britain's University for Industry is proposed as a 21st-century version of the Open University, intended to stimulate training innovations through a national learning network using communications technologies. It is likely to succeed only by sponsoring a demand-led training culture and an accessible infrastructure. (SK)

One-stop career centers conveniently locate employment and training services in one place. The example of bureaucratic confusion in Virginia shows the need for policy and a holistic global approach to such obstacles as lack of consensus on commingling and co-locating services and how and by whom centers are monitored. (SK)

A manufacturing organization that trained workers on the job using active learning techniques demonstrated to the organization the benefits of training. As a result, a cultural change has taken place and workers believe they have been empowered. (JOW)

A profile of 150 out-of-school rural Botswana youth revealed most were ages 16-18, 55% female, 52% with only primary education, and 60% unemployed. The majority chose farm occupations. Problems of rural areas included lack of educational and recreational facilities, employment security, health education, and access to land. Youth clubs, vocational…

NewLink helps adults at risk through quasi-autonomous local community organizations that provide training and employment opportunities within a learning organization framework. The concept derives from an extensive range of metaphors drawn from religious, humanist, and scientific thought. (Author/SK)

A community restaurant begun in Montreal by 12 welfare recipients has provided jobs and inexpensive meals and served community interests. It attempts to integrate social and economic development, operating not primarily as a job training program but as a community-based, socially useful business. (SK)

Includes "Skills Training for Women" (Dabney), a description of a program for displaced homemakers and single parents in Oklahoma that provides job training and support to reentry women; and "Celebrating Women's Technological Contributions" (Pierce), a unit to encourage students to look at women's technological accomplishments.…

Although women have achieved more participation and higher qualifications, the education and training systems are reinforcing highly rigid patterns of gender segregation in the Welsh labor force. Wales is thus consolidating its status as a low-wage, low-skill economy. (SK)

Learning for work is the focus of public policy in Australia, New Zealand, and Britain. However, meaningful public debate about the presumed benefits of training and lifelong learning has been stifled by rhetoric about competitiveness and economic survival. (SK)

Explores the relationship between resident assistant (R.A.) training and improvement of job performance. Results indicate that while even short-term interventions can bring about favorable outcomes in R.A.s' behavior on the job, these benefits may be limited to the promotion of sound work practices, as opposed to the elimination of problematic…

Analysis of approaches to funding continuing vocational training in Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom reveals a trend away from government-led funding toward demand-side initiatives. There is likely to be an even greater increase in distribution of training costs among government,…

A Winnipeg (Manitoba) school teacher started a nonprofit job skills training program for at-risk youth. Police donated equipment confiscated from marijuana cultivators to the program, which trains youth aged 15-29 in hydroponics, horticulture, and greenhouse operations. More than 75 percent of its graduates are employed in greenhouse or related…