The potential role of artificial intelligence in improving organisations' performance and productivity has been promoted regularly and vociferously since the 1960s. Artificial intelligence is today reborn out of big business, similar to the occurrences surrounding big data in the 1990s, and expectations are high regarding AI's potential role in businesses. This article discusses different aspects of knowledge work that tend to be ignored in the debate about whether or not artificial intelligence systems are a threat to jobs. A great deal of knowledge work concerns highly complex problem solving and must be understood in contextual, social and relational terms. These aspects have no generic nor universal rules and solutions and, thus, cannot be easily replaced by artificial intelligence or programmed into computer systems, nor are they constructed based on models of the rational brain. In this respect, this article draws on philosopher Herbert Dreyfus' thesis regarding artificial intelligence.

Studies of the Australian graduate labour market have found a substantial incidence of, and significant earnings effects from, vertical mismatch. This study extends the literature by examining horizontal mismatch, an important dimension of mismatch in its own right and which has been less studied. Over a quarter of Australian graduates are found to be mismatched, although the incidence is reduced in the longer term. Graduates from fields of study which are more occupation‐specific were found to be less likely to be mismatched. Earnings penalties were found for all forms of mismatch, and affected both general and specific fields of study.

Internships are becoming more relevant to universities as they provide students with practical skills that can be aligned with their career aspirations. Typically, successful undergraduate internship programs depend on the efficiency and design of the university internship program; the student commitment to the internship; and host organization's level of resource commitment to the program. Currently, there is very little empirical research conducted to examine how host organization based factors influence the quality of a good internship from a student interns' perspective. The Transaction Cost Economic (TCE) model was the theoretical lens used to address this research. The study used a survey (n=83) of an undergraduate internship program at a university in Australia. The findings indicate that the host organizations' resource commitment has a significant positive influence on the interns' perceived success of the internship. Findings from this research can help to align organizational resource commitment with the students' expectations.

The present article connects a secondary analysis of quantitative data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) with the theoretical approach of ‘literacy practices' and related research results from the so-called New Literacy Studies (NLS) tradition, which follows a cultural practices paradigm. According to the literacy as social practice approach, the analysis of adults' literacy and numeracy practices could provide relevant policy information about how to address target groups in adult literacy and basic education. Thus, a Latent Class Analysis was carried out with the German PIAAC dataset in order to differentiate the adult population by their uses of literacy, numeracy and ICT. As a result of this procedure, three subgroups of adults can be distinguished by the frequency in which they use selected skill-related activities. Surprisingly, an adult's individual literacy level does not clearly predict group membership. A further interesting result is that participants in one of the groups seem to compensate for the few chances they have to use their skills at work by using them more often in their everyday life. Both results contribute to the need to draw a more differentiated picture of adults with lower literacy skills.

Purpose: When learning in the workplace is conceptualised as a social process, different social or cultural features of workplaces may enable or constrain students' learning. The purpose of this paper is to understand the views of students, workplace supervisors and university academics concerning sociocultural features that influenced work-integrated learning (WIL) experiences. Design/methodology/approach: An interpretive case-study methodology, incorporating questionnaires and semi-structured interviews was used to determine the views of stakeholders involved in WIL experiences in a sport undergraduate degree., Findings: Students' learning was enhanced when they participated in authentic activities, worked alongside colleagues and could assume increasing responsibility for roles they were given. Social experiences, interactions and activities provided them with opportunities to access individual, shared and tacit knowledge, to learn about language, processes and protocols for interacting and communicating with others, and to become aware of the culture of the workplace. When students successfully acquired this knowledge they were able to 'take-on' the accepted characteristics and practices of the workplace community - an outcome that further enhanced their learning. Practical implications: Students need to understand the social and cultural dimensions of how the work community practices before they begin WIL experiences. Practical ways of addressing this are suggested. Originality/value: This paper conceptualises WIL as learning through the 'practice of work communities' whereby through the activities of the community students can access knowledge in a way that may differ from what they are familiar with from their experiences within the university environment.

Economic inequality is one of the biggest challenges facing society today. Inequality has been recently exacerbated by growth in high- and low-wage occupations at the expense of middle-wage occupations, leading to a 'hollowing' of the middle class. Yet, our understanding of how workplace skills drive this process is limited. Specifically, how do skill requirements distinguish high- and low-wage occupations, and does this distinction constrain the mobility of individuals and urban labor markets? Using unsupervised clustering techniques from network science, we show that skills exhibit a striking polarization into two clusters that highlight the specific social-cognitive skills and sensory-physical skills of high- and low-wage occupations, respectively. The connections between skills explain various dynamics: how workers transition between occupations, how cities acquire comparative advantage in new skills, and how individual occupations change their skill requirements. We also show that the polarized skill topology constrains the career mobility of individual workers, with low-skill workers 'stuck' relying on the low-wage skill set. Together, these results provide a new explanation for the persistence of occupational polarization and inform strategies to mitigate the negative effects of automation and offshoring of employment.

We investigated whether a set of indicators of the employability dimensions proposed by Fugate, Kinicki, and Asforth (i.e., career identity, personal adaptability, and human and social capital) are related to university graduates' employment status and five indicators of the quality of their jobs (pay, hierarchical level, vertical and horizontal match, and job satisfaction). We analyzed a representative sample of university graduates (N = 7,881) from the population of graduates who obtained their degree from the University of Valencia in the period 2006-2010. The results showed that indicators of human and social capital were related to employment status, whereas indicators of human and social capital and career identity were related to distinct job quality indicators. These results support the validity of the conceptual model proposed by Fugate et al. to investigate employability in samples of university graduates.

The fissuring of business structures fundamentally changes the nature of employment and work in industries and the economy as a whole. This article describes the core elements comprising fissuring, distinguishes them from the narrower concepts of contingent work and alternative work arrangements, and provides an estimate of its size. Work restructuring arising from fissuring alters wage determination inside and outside firms affected by it and provides an alternative explanation for a growing empirical literature on earnings inequality. The fissured workplace perspective requires different policies for the workplace and labor market than traditional approaches including those regarding worker rights and protections, employment responses to the business cycle, workforce education and training, and job and career mobility.

In after-school programs, skill-building is a holistic process by which adolescents - guided by adults - achieve mastery. Developmental theories such as Bronfenbrenner's bioecological model position youth as active learners; however, little is known about the specific actions youth use to enhance their learning during skill-building opportunities. Qualitative analysis of 49 semi-structured observations of enrichment activities at a high-quality after-school program showed that adolescents used four types of actions while completing a project: inquiry, contribution, self-regulation, and peer education. These behaviors indicated youths' level of cognitive engagement. Instructors' practices related to questioning, monitoring, group management, and sharing control demonstrate the range of instructional practices that can be used in response to teens' use of the four types of learning actions. This study presents a theoretical model of the skill-building process that illustrates how teens' behaviors interact with staff practices and the demands of project-based learning.