Journal Article

Purpose - The changing nature of work dynamics demands that managers keep up to date in skills, knowledge, and competencies. Besides, nowadays these professionals need to understand the business beyond the frontiers of their own organizations. This phenomenon has led to new forms of alternative mentoring for managers and entrepreneurs, as companies battle for talent in a globalized way. Professional associations, consultancy firms, and other agents are starting to offer mentoring programs in which the mentor and mentee often belong to different organizations or take place within a group. Design/methodology/approach - The purpose of this study is to present a conceptual model for alternative mentoring for managers. This model is a new approach to mentoring, and it will try to clarify some of the bases of a phenomenon that is increasingly present in the managerial field. Findings - The paper also suggests some advantages of alternative mentoring when compared to traditional mentoring. Originality/value - This paper contributes to a better understanding of new forms of alternative mentoring while providing practitioners in the field with a better understanding of key issues for alternative mentoring.

Systems are, to a large extent, about relationships between people, activities, objects, technologies, and places. A systems approach focuses on how things are interrelated, and what the different parts can accomplish together. In similar terms, reflective thinking is also relational. We think often with each other when we talk about and share our experiences and memories. We are also increasingly using smart objects for our everyday activities. However, designing IoT (Internet of Things) devices typically relies on artifacts rather than relationships. In this paper, we present a modeling technique for the design and analysis of IoT artifacts and systems that is fundamentally relational in its approach. Having outlined the need for relational approaches to designing IoT systems, we first present three examples, where we demonstrate how our relational approach allows for the analysis of existing smart objects designed to function in different relationships with the user, user activity and the situation. Accordingly, we present these IoT systems from the perspectives of the augment me , the comply with me , and the engage me relational models. Having presented these three examples that illustrate how IoT systems can be analyzed as systems of relationships, we then present the prototype of an IoT artifact intended to support reflection in the user. With this fourth example, we introduce the make me think relationship, and also show how our modeling technique can be useful for design of new IoT systems. Accordingly, we suggest a modeling technique that can be used as a tool for designing and analyzing IoT systems. We believe this modeling technique can contribute to a relational approach toward IoT. We conclude this paper suggesting that our proposed modeling technique cannot only help to model relationships between a user and a smart object, but can also be scaled, allowing for the modeling of more complex IoT systems, where there are an increased number of users using many smart objects in different places, but still integrated as a complex system.

The perceived purpose of college education keeps shifting. There was a time that its purpose was seen as teaching ethics/morality/values to students. Today, the focus is on delivering skills and competencies to succeed in life as well as a career. This paper posits that the ideal university ensures that all courses regardless of discipline work together to enhance the skills of students. This ensures that students will be resilient and productive regardless of how often the nature of their work changes. The accounting major is used as an example to demonstrate how a skills-based education together with a disciplinary major produces the ideal accountant. The outdated distinction between intellectual and vocational majors is meaningless since any major can be enhanced once there is an emphasis on delivering skills together with the content.

The Productivity Commission's work on 'new models of tertiary education' houses the latest iteration of a discourse around 'transferable skills' at tertiary level that has deep implications for how we conceive of the purpose and value of tertiary education. Skills are increasingly located at the centre of conceptions of graduate outcomes, rather than as foundational or peripheral. However, such discourse does not often acknowledge the complexity of skills instruction or of transfer, and often positions skills instruction as aligned with employability outcomes and in opposition to knowledge, tradition, and the social good of higher education. Accordingly, and with a particular focus on writing instruction, this commentary argues that more subtle accounts of skills instruction and its civic implications are warranted.

Supported by media technologies, today’s employees can increasingly decide when and where to work. The present study examines positive and negative aspects of this temporal and spatial flexibility, and the perceptions of control in these situations based on propositions of self-determination theory. Using an exploratory approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 45 working digital natives. Participants described positive and negative situations separately for temporal and spatial flexibility and rated the extent to which they felt autonomous and externally controlled. Situations appraised positively were best described by decision latitude, while negatively evaluated ones were best described by work–nonwork conflict. Positive situations were perceived as autonomous rather than externally controlled; negative situations were rated as autonomously and externally controlled to a similar extent.

The purpose of this paper is to create a profile of the modern American academic librarian through the content analysis method of job advertisements. Design/methodology/approach - One hundred thirty-four advertisements were analyzed in various ways, e.g. salary, skills, qualifications, duties, followed by a multivariate analysis. Findings - Most significant findings include the importance of communication skills for all academic librarians, the significance of the Library and Information Science (LIS) degree and that applicants should expect a salary of $40,000-60,000. Originality/value - This paper builds on the previous studies in the field to verify that communication skills are among the most, if not the most, desired skills for a modern librarian, and that an LIS degree is still an asset.

Industrial organization has experienced several models with Taylorism and Fordism Toyotism pillars of economic growth patterns between 1945 and the 70 Examination of technological developments taking place in research labs and some companies indicate changes not so much major in automation, but at the level of intelligence via networked machines and machine connections / men. Some plants seem strange at first, there are robots and digital equipment in mass that allows us to say that industrial organization is moving away more and more of the known model. [googletranslate_en]

Interactive service occupations, requiring face-to-face contact, are rapidly growing in the US as they are typically not susceptible to larger trends of offshoring and computerization. Yet conventional paradigms of understanding the nature of that work, and in particular the skill demands, are often ill equipped to deal with the ‘interactive’ aspects of these gendered and racialized occupations. As a result, discussions of lower-end service occupations have typically grouped together a variety of jobs that require little or no higher education, without examining the actual skill content and job requirements of these occupations. In this article we delve more deeply into the rapidly growing non-professional service occupations in the US and the level of skills these jobs require, with the intention of creating a framework that will reorient future sociological research in this area.

This article studies how portable skills accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data on tasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task‐specific human capital to measure empirically the transferability of skills across occupations. Our results on occupational mobility and wages show that labor market skills are more portable than previously considered. We find that individuals move to occupations with similar task requirements and that the distance of moves declines with experience. We also show that task‐specific human capital is an important source of individual wage growth, accounting for up to 52% of overall wage growth.