Journal Article

The benefits of bilingual education for a disadvantaged indigenous population as an investment in human capital are significant. Students of bilingual schools in Guatemala have higher attendance and promotion rates, and lower repetition and dropout rates. Bilingual students receive higher scores on all subject matters, including mastery of Spanish. The efficiency of bilingual education is confirmed by a crude cost–benefit exercise. A shift to bilingual schooling would result in considerable cost savings because of reduced repetition. The higher quality of education generating higher promotion rates will help students complete primary education and will substantially increase completion rates at low cost. The costs saving due to bilingual education is estimated at $5 million, equal to the cost of primary education for 100,000 students.

There is an increasing need for analysing the demand for skills in the labour market. While most studies aggregate skills in groups or use available proxies for them, the authors analyse the demand by employers for individual competences. Such an analysis better reflects reality because companies usually require job candidates to have particular competences, rather than generally defined groups of skills. However, no method exists to analyse on a large scale which competences are required by employers. At a detailed level, there are hundreds of competences; thus, this demand cannot be measured in a sample survey. The authors propose a method for conducting a continuous and efficient analysis of the demand for competences of prospective employees. The method involves collecting online job offers and analysing them with data mining and text analysis tools. The authors use this method to analyse transversal competences in the Polish labour market. Their findings indicate that companies typically required only certain competences-especially 'language and communication competences'-while neglecting others. The number of job candidate requirements was counter-cyclical. However, the structure of the competences demanded did not change during the analysed period.

The pace of knowledge growth is so rapid during the last decades that even the valedictorian knowledge become obsolete in the coming years and the lifelong learning emerges as a natural solution. However, unlimited access to unimaginable amounts of data determines a paradigm shift as far as a learning process: from learning to learning to learn. Technology will continue to be the driving force in changing the world: computing, mobility, automation and robotics, an open world of science, neuro-technology, chemistry, nanotechnology, fabulous new intelligent materials - to mention just a few of them. Career paths of the future must be understood and conceived from a quite different viewpoint: the future shall stretch as much as possible our abilities to grow, adapt and learn. Volatile, temporary roles may be superposed over what shall consider being the backbone of our profession. Professions will change dramatically and fast and switching from one profession to another is going to become the norm. The career planning is turning into professional life planning: from making strategic decisions for career progressing within the certain profession to integrate them in meta-strategic decisions made for fore-sighting one's successful sequence of professions. The purpose of this paper is to launch a discussion about professional life planning - which is changing professions across an extended active life-span (made possible by an increased life expectancy, as result of the same extraordinary technology progress): are we, educators and students, human resource managers and policy makers, ready for this type of meta-strategic decisions?

This exploratory study examines union-civil alliances in New Zealand (NZ). It focuses on the involvement of NZ's peak union body, the Council of Trade Unions, in three civil group coalitions around the Living Wage Campaign, Decent Work Agenda and Environmental Agenda. It assesses how the CTU and its affiliates' coalition involvement are informed by and seek to progress liberal (representative), participatory and/or more radical democratic principles, and what this means for organizational practice; the relations between the coalition parties; workplaces; and beyond. Through case discussions, the study finds that civil alliances involving the CTU and its affiliates do not reflect a core trait of union activity in NZ. Among the union-civil alliances that do exist, there is a prevailing sense of their utility to progress shared interests alongside, and on the union side, a more instrumental aim to encourage union revival. However, the alliances under examination reflect an engagement with various liberal and participatory democratic arrangements at different organizational levels. More radical democratic tendencies emerge in relation to ad hoc elements of activity and the aspirational goals of such coalitions as opposed to their usual processes and institutional configurations. In essence, what emerges is a labour centre and movement which, on the one hand, is in a survivalist mode primarily concerned with economistic matters, and on the other, in a position of relative political and bargaining weakness, reaching out to other civil groups where it can so as to challenge the neo-liberal hegemony. Based on our findings, we conclude that Laclau and Mouffe's (2001) view of radical democracy holds promise for subsequent coalitions involving the CTU, particularly in the context of NZ workers' diverse interests and the plurality of other civil groups and social movements' interests. This view concerns on-going agency, change, organizing and strategy by coalitions to build inclusive (counter-) hegemony, arguing for a politic from below that challenges existing dominant neo-liberal assumptions in work and other spheres of life.

Globalization requires organizations to innovate and renew itself at a very fast pace. In this context, the ideas are emerging as a central resource and strategy that the organization must manage and develop. Organizational creativity becomes a differentiating issue for organizations, and even a response to the challenge of survival of organizations. We propose to enrich the discussions on organizational creativity in strategic management by addressing the issue of the management of creative ideas of their free courses in and outside of the organization, and the emergence of organizational creativity as that creative ability. We conclude by research avenues to explore to characterize the creative capabilities, and consider them as the organizational capacity of its own. [googletranslate_en]

This article aims to formalize, test and update the method for identifying distinctive competencies based on the use of human resources information system applications (HRIS) within three subsidiaries of large Tunisian industrial group. A process of intervention research has been concretely implemented and rational myth built on the occasion has been translated in identifying distinctive competencies System (IDCS). The work of Hamel and Prahalad (1990, 1995) and David guidelines (2000) were widely mobilized. The methodological device in situ based on the presentation and experimentation of SICDs WITH 74 officers and staff managers as well as a perspective of its appropriation by both users and prescribers. This article shows - besides the relevance of an approach such intervention research deal with such questions addressing the HRIS - the interest of highlighting individual dimensions of competence, the contribution of ICT in the process of identifying the meaning wide and the need for analysis of the practice exceeded posts by mobilizing the HRIS and especially SICDs. [googletranslate_en]

Analysis of the 1971–2001 Canadian Censuses shows that both cohort- and period-based analyses contribute to understanding change. Cohort models reveal substantial reshaping of the age trajectories of the earnings of full-time full-year workers. The earnings of young men declined substantially, men's earnings increased more rapidly with age, the age of peak earnings increased, and earnings declined less after their peak. Women's earnings, nearly unrelated to age in 1970, came to resemble the age trajectory of men. Earnings trajectories are also a function of education, immigration, and racialization. The period models reveal a substantial shock between 1970 and 1980 that dramatically increased the earnings of women and lowered the university premium at all ages. These results do not support the argument that skill-biased technological change (SBTC) reshaped the earnings.

The relationship between learning and innovation has been a central theme in studies of innovation (Fagerberg et al., 2005, Borras & Edquist, 2014, Lundvall & Johnsen, 1994). Studies of the workplace have also claimed a relationship between skills or training and a firm's ability to innovate (Toner, 2011). Recent studies of innovation in European firms (Arundal et al., 2007) included surveys on organisational contexts and suggested that some organisational forms were especially conducive to learning and innovation. Studies of the learning context or of training and skills development often refer to, or make assumptions about learning, without explaining who is learning or how this learning is occurring. This article supplements some of these earlier surveys by carrying out in‐depth qualitative studies of learners in innovative organisations in Norway. The organisation of activities and the learning environments are analysed. This is supplemented by information on local HRM practice and strategies for skills development and training. The data include information on formal and informal learning of participants working within product development. We then discuss how these workers draw upon their learning in their everyday work and how their everyday work provides the opportunity for new learning. By linking HRM and innovation, this article offers a novel way of studying adult learning in the workplace and adds to our understanding of how it contributes to economic success.

Faced with different disabilities related to novelty, the scarcity of resources and lack of legitimacy, contractors must provide the means enabling them to continue their newly created projects. In this perspective, the social network theory has largely emphasized the entrepreneur's social capital enables him to convey key resources that are required throughout the entrepreneurial process. The objective of this article is to demonstrate how specific social skills are the levers that contribute significantly to the development of different types of social networks conducive to the contractor's access to critical resources. [googletranslate_en]