Journal Article

Approaches to innovation have been thoroughly studied in the last decades. It’s well understood that an organizations’ culture is among the crucial factors for success and renewal of organizations. Yet culture is made by people and their attitudes. Innovation culture requires skills and competence by employees which are presumably beyond the traditional basic knowledge taught at undergraduate, graduate and post graduate level. This is even more evident for university graduates who’re mainly finding professional careers in the private sector who has special requirements to employees. Graduates’ skills are strongly influenced by curricula and the cultural values and norms outside curricula transferred by universities to students. But frequently these skills are designed by universities without profound knowledge of the actual skills required. At the same time organizations acting as potential graduates’ employers value researcher skills and competencies differently from how these are perceived. The paper suggests that understanding the professional and universal skills of researchers perceived and needed is one element of innovation culture. Thereby the skills in discussion go beyond purely academic skills only; instead it is proposed that skills which increase the absorptive capacity of companies are crucial for implementing effective productive innovation management.

This article reviews recent literature concerning the impact of job automation on tasks, productivity, and work. Building my argument by drawing on data collected from Atlas, Autonomous Research, McKinsey Global Institute, OECD/PIAAC, Pew Research Center, PwC, and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, I performed analyses and made estimates regarding percentage of adults who think it is likely that people would have a hard time finding jobs/the inequality between the rich and poor would be much worse than it is today/ economy would be more efficient/there would be new, better-paying jobs if robots and computers were able to do much of the work currently being done by humans, time spent in U.S. occupations and ability to automate, percentage of EU jobs at high risk of automation by 2030s (by sector), percentage of adults who say that in the next 50 years robots and computers will do much of the work currently done by humans, and percentage of workers who say the jobs/professions they work in now will/will not exist in 50 years.

When two Silicon Valley start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, embarked in 2012 on a bold effort to supply college-level courses for free over the Internet to learners worldwide, the notion of the Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) captured the nation's attention. Although MOOCs are an interesting experiment with a role to play in the future of higher education, they are a surprisingly small part of the online higher education scene. We believe that online education, at least online education that begins to take full advantage of the interactivity offered by the web, is still in its infancy. We begin by sketching out the several faces of online learning—asynchronous, partially asynchronous, the flipped classroom, and others—as well as how the use of online education differs across the spectrum of higher education. We consider how the growth of online education will affect cost and convenience, student learning, and the role of faculty and administrators. We argue that spread of online education through higher education is likely to be slower than many commenters expect. We hope that online education will bring substantial benefits. But less-attractive outcomes are also possible if, for instance, legislators use the existence of online education as an excuse for sharp cuts in higher education budgets that lead to lower-quality education for many students, at the same time that richer, more selective schools are using online education as one more weapon in the arms race dynamic that is driving costs higher.

Using Constructivist Grounded Theory this research sought to explore the nature of knowledge workers and knowledge work itself. The interview findings reveal that knowledge workers have a set of processes they employ to remain connected and informed both personally and professionally in their domain area of expertise. They have learned to collect, curate, work with and share information to their best advantage. We have described this as knowledge workers knowledge enhancement process. A deeper understanding of this process has implications for organisations aiming to optimise the work of knowledge workers and for those teaching new knowledge workers for the future.

Perceived work ability refers to a worker's assessment of his or her ability to continue working in his or her job, given characteristics of the job along with his or her personal resources. Perceived work ability is a critical variable to study in the U.S., given an aging workforce, trends to delay retirement, and U.S. policy considerations to delay the age at which full Social Security retirement benefits may be obtained. Based on the Job Demands-Resources Model, cognitive appraisal theory of stress and push/pull factors related to retirement, we proposed and tested a conceptual model of antecedents and outcomes of perceived work ability using three independent samples of U.S. working adults. Data regarding workers’ job characteristics were from self-report and O*NET measures. Results from relative importance analysis indicated that health and sense of control were consistently and most strongly related to work ability perceptions relative to other job demands and job resources when perceived work ability was measured concurrently or two weeks later in samples with varying occupations. Job demands (along with health and sense of control) were most strongly related to work ability perceptions when perceived work ability was measured in a manufacturing worker sample 1.6 years later. Perceived work ability also predicted lagged labor force outcomes (absence, retirement, and disability leave) while controlling for other known predictors of each. Consistent indirect effects were observed from health status and sense of control to all three of these outcomes via perceived work ability.

New developments in technologies and global changes in business environment have placed demands on the HR professionals to acquire new competencies and skills. The role of Human Resources Management (HRM) and the Human Resources practitioner has long been discussed within the walls of academia and in the practical work environment. "Over time, the HR practitioner has taken on new roles and responsibilities in order to meet increasing expectations around the value-add of the Human Resource (HR) function and its legitimacy within the workplace. In order to take on new and adaptable roles, those looking at working in HR need specific skills and competencies" (Girardi, 2014A). This study set to identify the technical and generic skills and competencies needed to be a contemporary HR practitioner from three different perspectives - the academic literature, the practitioner (industry-based) literature and the potential employer. A comprehensive literature review was undertaken to analyse the perspectives of the academics. To peep into the professional perspective, a critical review of the HR generalist, HR specific associations and HR consulting firms was carried out. Finally, a desktop research of various HR related advertisements, helped to identify the employers' perspectives. The key skills identified include: ability to build effective relationships, influence, negotiate and lead effectively. The findings revealed that scholarly journals do not identify the "project management" skills required by HR practitioner. The professional literature synthesis also did not capture the theme of "change steward". The employers' perspective also excluded the "change steward" and "global acumen" themes. The breadth and depth of the identified themed skills will result in the HR practitioner requiring further education in other business fields or training and experience in fields such as financial, marketing and information technology. Employers will place significant value on its HR practitioner as a strategic business partner (the identified theme) for its business. The perspective identified from three different viewpoints should help HR professional to take initiative in excelling in many areas especially knowledge beyond the traditional HR practices.

A major theme within social gerontology is how retirement 'is being re-organised, if not undone'. Institutional supports for retirement are weakening, with pension ages rising in many countries. Increasing numbers of older workers are working past traditional retirement age on a part-time or self-employed basis, and a growing minority are joining the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Drawing upon narrative interviews with older Australians who are involuntarily non-employed or underemployed, this article explores how the 'unravelling' of retirement is experienced by a group of older workers on the periphery of the labour market. While policy makers hope that higher pension ages will lead to a longer period of working life, the risk is that older workers, especially those experiencing chronic insecurity in the labour market, will be caught in a netherworld between work and retirement.

The aging workforce poses perplexing policy challenges, even in Canada, which is demographically young among comparable countries. We ask what the evidence shows about whether there are, or will be, labour or skills shortages as the workforce ages. Highlighting the challenges of measuring labour/ skills shortages, we explore peer-reviewed research in the 2000–2013 period. No evidence is found of a national labour shortage in the foreseeable future. In fact, the workforce is predicted to grow for the coming two decades with less shrinkage than in the past as a result of retirements. Regional and occupational shortages occur at times, as well as underutilized skills.

The purpose of this study was to investigate if chronological age sparks negative expectancies thus initiating a self-fulfilling prophecy in technology training interactions. Data were obtained from undergraduate students (age ≤ 30) paired in 85 trainer–trainee dyads and examined through the actor-partner interdependence model. Trainer and trainee age (younger or older) were manipulated in this laboratory experiment by presenting pre-selected photographs coupled with voice enhancing software. As compared to younger trainees, ostensibly older trainees evoked negative expectancies when training for a technological task, which ultimately manifested in poorer training interactions and trainer evaluations of trainee performance.