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The purpose of this study is to provide an insight into the skill development and training related issues of the management jobs of textile and garments sector of Bangladesh which includes the skills requirements, differences in the skills of domestic managers and expatriates, local training facilities and barriers companies confront while sending their staffs abroad for training. A qualitative research approach has been adopted in this study where data has been collected through 30 in-depth interviews based on convenient and snowball sampling. The findings indicate that certain skills of domestic managers are quite poor like English proficiency, presentation skills, leadership skills, decision making skills. The RMG and textile firms send their employees to Germany, China, UK, USA, Japan and other countries for training but they encounter barriers like visa issues, breach of contract by the employees etc. in this attempt. Government, RMG and textile industries and various trade bodies, educational and training institutions should step up to organize training, develop skill-oriented curriculum to eliminate the reasons of hiring expats. The outcome of this study can be a source material through which HR managers can identify the scarce managerial skills and devise training and skill development programs accordingly not only in Bangladesh, but also in similar developing countries.

Eportfolio is a powerful tool to develop students’ communication as well as critical thinking skills as it allowsstudents to produce their own reflective written products and foster active learning. This study aims to design aninnovative teaching approach to improve students’ written communication skills in English which is one of theimportant soft skills for students entering the workforce. Specifically, this study intends to design an eportfolioconceptual framework that can be embedded into an English course. Furthermore, the interactivity mediated bythe social networking platform and students’ familiarity using this platform can also elevate their motivation towrite in English language. This study contributes to the creation of an innovative teaching approach, astudent-centered learning approach that utilizes online technology. The new developed eportfolio framework canalso be adopted in other English courses for the purpose of improving students’ writing skills in Englishlanguage. Future research should emphasize on the eportfolio model evaluation, integration with soft skills andstudents' perception of the use of this web-based tool using Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).

The article aims to elaborate certain patterns of formation of organizational and managerial expertise of futureteachers of technology and entrepreneurship. The main study approaches were integrative, expertise and activityapproaches defining methodology, content and technology of forming organizational and managerial expertise offuture teachers.The presented pattern of organizational and managerial expertise of future technology andentrepreneurship teachers includes the following sections: regulatory and target, theoretical andmethodological, algorithmic, procedural and productive-evaluative sections. This article material can beuseful for high school professors who offer specific training for future technology and entrepreneurshipteachers, for teachers and school managers within specific training courses and when enhancing professionalskills of technology and entrepreneurship teachers.

Extending to explore how organizational antecedents affect absorptive capacity, this research proposed a theoretical model linking microfoundations of organizational routines and capabilities with network effects through high potential acumen leader (H-PAL). Drawing on a network effects of network position perspective with design thinking to enhance absorptive capacity, I argue that organizational design become a determinant factors on firm to produce more innovation on yielding better performance if leader has significance potential to grow in both the greater scale and scope of promising management skills. Building upon the dynamic capabilities view of the firm, the paper proposed an advance model with design thinking approach convincing that the value of conceptualizing and operationalizing network effects of network position via high potential acumen leader have open up new research interest that cut across traditional “micro versus macro” boundaries.

Under the guidance of national policy, Chinese higher education institutions use English as teaching language. With this feature, an international environment is formed that the university offers places to eligible students from all over the world and employs qualified teachers from all over the world to teach students. Working in an international environment, the teaching secretaries’ job is different. This paper analyzes the job particularity of teaching secretaries working in an international environment in higher education institutions that their working language is English and they have to work with teachers and students from all over the world, answer teachers and students questions and solve their problems related to teaching affairs. This paper proposes some effective measures from the personal aspect and university aspect to raise the quality of the teaching secretaries’ job. And this paper gets a conclusion that the teaching secretaries working in an international environment should increasingly improve their comprehensive quality, professional knowledge, and management skills.

Developing students’ Interpersonal Skills is a core element of any well-designed Technical and VocationalEducation (TVE) particularly in this present era. This is couple with the fact that Interpersonal skills are amongthe crucial skills preferred in the world of work setting for the betterment of both employer and employee. Overthe years, employers of labour have drastically observed decline in interpersonal capabilities of high schoolgraduate for meeting the 21st century workplace’s challenges. However, abundant literatures have indicated thepotential roles of service-learning in providing students to achieve knowledge, cognitive skills (disciplinespecific Skills) and core employability skills specifically the interpersonal skills required in 21st centuryworkplaces. It is on this regard that this library work shed light on the concept of interpersonal skills, concept ofservice-learning, influence of service-learning in TVE for improving students’ interpersonal skills and the needsof interpersonal skills in TVE related job places. In conclusion, the paper discloses that the fact that there iscrucial demand for TVE graduates to posses interpersonal skills and other work skills for effective jobperformance in the competitive global work environment, it was finally recommended that in order to ensure noskills gap, educators in TVE training institutions, should equip the forthcoming TVE graduates with thenecessary skills for employment by lying more emphasize on renown and superior instructional pedagogies suchas the Service-Learning.

One of the key issues of the country is poor command of certain skills among university graduates from Public Higher Education Institute (PHEI). This matter has increased the rate of unemployment among graduates. This is because the industry as one of the key sectors of the economy generators needs human capital that masters various skills. The industry is facing global competition that requires them to participate and compete. Hence, to ensure that their position remains strong and relevant, human capital that masters skills such as communication skills, decision making, teamwork and others are urgently needed. Hence the emphasis on the aspects of these skills should be incorporated in the national education system. This article discusses the direction of generic skills courses at the National University of Malaysia in fulfilling the needs of Malaysian qualifications framework. This study is performed through analysis methodology on relevant documents in the matter. The study found that the National University of Malaysia has already implemented adoption of generic skills in courses offered, in fulfilling Malaysian qualifications framework. This will produce a student that is equipped with generic skills and further meets the needs of the job market.

The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between "workforce agility" and "organizational intelligence" (considering the components of both concepts and contextual variables, too).The population included the managers and employees working at the grade one companies of "Iran High Council of Informatics".Results showed a significant positive correlation between workforce agility and organizational intelligence. All components of organizational intelligence (except strategic vision), had a positive significant relationship with workforce agility. The relationship between the individual components of workforce agility (except interpersonal adaptability) and organizational intelligence is positive and significant. Variables of Age, work experience, and organizational position, had a positive significant relationship with the agility of the workforce, while about sex and educational level, no significant relationship was found.It is recommended simple and operational translation of mission statement and strategies for employees, establishing of feedback system, enhancing of employees work-life quality and participation, facilitating learning, managerial skills training, putting employees in decision-making situation, taking advantage of the cultural diversity, be considered. Moreover employment of professionals (regardless of gender, or merely emphasis on educational degree) must be considered.

Efficient human resource management and skills development are central to any organization. However, identified less than 15 to 20 percent of the knowledge and skills acquired in trainings were actually applied in workplaces. Lack of awareness and limited skills learned have caused loss of funds invested in training programs and continued to contribute to mismatches in labour issues. Thus, this conceptual paper proposes key aspects of learning transfer required in training institution based on National Occupational Skill Standards (NOSS) system and in workplace environment. A conceptual framework which is based on critical reviews of current approaches in studies of learning transfer has been devised to highlight the relationship between learning transfer and skills training for today’s workplaces. The framework is a scientifically robust framework for transfer of learning at skill institutions. This study is significant in emphasizing the need for appropriate evaluation methods that can assist practitioners at skill institutions to develop learning transfer in a more credible manner.

This research was conducted to compare generic skills involving the Malay language specialization students in Malaysia from two higher education institutions: a public university (PU) and a teacher training institute (TTI). The two skills investigated to study the 127 participants were communication skills and leadership skills. From the total number, 77 participants were from the PU and the remaining 50 from the TTI. The MyGSI instrument was employed to measure the skills and data were analyzed and reported into mean value. The findings suggested an acceptable account of mastery among the trainee teachers in both skills even though a higher proficiency was evident among the PU students. The study implicated 1) a further in-depth research on the syllabus of these institutions as to how the results were not at variance, 2) an effort for a standardization of an improved syllabus to encourage the production of excellent teachers across schools in Malaysia, and 3) a portfolio assessment among the students where the display of generic skills through program participation and management by the trainee teachers is graded officially by the training institutions.

Strategic management is a set of managerial skills that should be used throughout the organization especially for all school leaders in a wide variety of functions to achieve organizational vision and mission or goals. This study aims to examine the level of practice of strategic management among the school administrators of National Primary School and Chinese Primary School in Seremban, Malaysia, in 12 aspects of school management. A total of 30 teachers from National Primary School and 30 teachers from Chinese Primary School were taken as respondents in this study. The instrument used in this research was questionnaires and the analysis of this quantitative data employed descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. The result of the study showed that there was a significant difference based on the types of the school in which the level of practice of strategic management among school administrators in Chinese Primary School was higher than the National Primary School. The findings are useful for school leaders, teachers and all school practitioners as well as policy makers of strategic planning and management issues as well as practices which exist in the twelve aspects studied. Implications for research and practice were discussed.

The objectives of this study were 1) to identify problems and threats to the management of community enterprises in the Songkhla Lake basin; and 2) to study guidelines for the management of community enterprises in the Songkhla Lake basin. The researchers conducted a fieldwork survey and in-depth interviews with 30 entrepreneurs using convenience sampling and snowball sampling. In addition, the researchers used the focus group technique by inviting nine experts to discuss the guidelines for the management of community enterprises. From this study, we found that the main problems are marketing, finances and accounting, production, management information systems, product design, and the cost of production. We found that the state agency is an important unit in the development and support of community enterprises with respect to knowledge, all aspects of production and management skills, marketing support, and specifying the regulations for community enterprises.

This article introduced a combination of study habits and test taking skills intervention for students on how to control test anxiety and promote their abilities and academic achievement. Based on skill-deficit model, anxious students suffer from test anxiety due to inability of using sufficient study habits and test taking skills to approach examination. Study skills interventions may assist anxious students to distinguish, recover and increase their study habits and test-taking skills. Study skills training intervention can improve students’ cognitive processes which affect the organization, processing and retrieval information. Study skills and test-taking skills training are two related treatment components of new study-skills training program. The present intervention introduced in this paper, attempts to guide students on the nature of anxiety, test anxiety, goal setting, motivation, time management techniques, memory tips, reading and summarizing skills improvement and test taking tricks. Through this intervention as a practical tool, students can be able to learn various tips and strategies across the study habits and test taking skills activities to improve their study abilities and academic achievement.

Teachers play an important role for teaching science process skills in class through planning and arranging learning activities and teaching how to reach scientific information. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the teaching aproaches used in the teaching and learning process of a science class are able to provide the opportunity to inculcate science process skills and to identify which science process skills were inculcated (if any) during the lesson without actually planning to teach science process skills. This is a qualitative case study in two Smart Schools in Malaysia. 24 students aged 14 years old and two science teachers were the sample of this study This study revealed that the process of teaching and learning science that uses various teaching approaches in one science lessons has additional advantages in terms of providing opportunities for the inculcation of science process skills. It also managed to provide the students with the opportunity to learn independently in acquiring some of the skills. The use of various teaching approaches is in juxtaposition to each other. Science teaching and learning process is a dynamic process, where the movement from one teaching approach to another occur and not necessarily always occur in an orderly sequence. Hence, the use of various teaching approaches in a single lesson can create more opportunities for inculcation and acquisition of science process skills in the classroom.

Research on employability skills were conducted nationally and internationally, found that many technical graduates lacked employability skills. This article reports on the study of employability skills that technical students should acquire to be employed and sustained in manufacturing industries. The study investigates the importance of employability skills as perceived by 107 employers from manufacturing industries. The findings of the study revealed employers place great importance on interpersonal skills, thinking skills and personal qualities that students need to emphasize to be employed in manufacturing industries. Indicators such as work safety, integrity, customer service, creative/innovative thinking and problem solving, and exercise leadership showed the highest mean score. Overall employers from manufacturing industries placed employability skills as must be owned by all graduates to enable them to compete in the global market.

This paper presents a method to evaluate the performance score based on employability skills for new engineers using NSW - Normalised Skill Weight. NSW is calculated from data collected from 337 employers of engineering industries in Kelang Valley, Malaysia. A questionnaire constructed to collect employers’ perspectives regarding the level of requirement for each employability skills based on their needs. Twelve types of businesses related to engineering field engaged in the survey. In an earlier publication, in EDUCON2011, the authors have presented the employability skills for an entry-level engineer as seen by Malaysian employers. The finding shows the rank of skills according to the level of requirement and there are weight differences among the skills required by the industries. The result of analysis offers a suggestion for employers and undergraduates to calculate employability skills score based on the Normalised Skill Weight performed by engineering graduates. Furthermore, employers, who need to evaluate the quality of engineering graduates during interviews, might find this approach as key performance score for the assessment process to select new engineers.

Generic skills play a vital role in increasing the employability and marketability of a student. As for the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, UKM, some of these skills are imparted in the assignment given to students called Open Ended Laboratory (OEL). In this OEL assignment, students are required to propose an experiment title based on the general topic given for that particular semester. The students, working in groups of 3 to 4 students, need to determine the objectives, apparatus and methods as well as execute the experiment. A report including results, discussion, conclusion and references is submitted for evaluation. The final presentation of students’ work is organised in a competition poster presentation format. Skills such as communication (oral and written), organisation, teamwork, innovation and creativity were evaluated for this assignment. We discovered that these skills can be nurtured by looking at the marks given by the judges and peer assessment matrices.

Past studies on employability of graduates have placed great emphasis on the supply side efforts in generic skills development which includes the tertiary curriculum design and delivery mechanisms. However, the responsibility of employers in providing training to prospective graduates and collaborating with universities in enhancing generic skills has been raised. On the demand side, there are numerous studies that have examined employer’s perspective in the private sector but few studies have examined employer’s perspective in the public sector. The objectives in this study are twofold: (1) to identify employers’ perception of the ideal generic skills that graduate employees should possess, and (2) to elicit employers’ perception of the lack of generic skills that prospective graduates (i.e. industrial trainees) currently possess. A qualitative research design was utilized, involving primary interview data collected through 16 key informant interviews of employers in the public sector in Kuantan and Johor Bahru. These key informant employers were selected from the UKM’s social science industrial trainees who attended training at these two sites. These interview data were analyzed using content analysis. The findings indicate that there are specific generic skills in the area of information and social interaction skills that the public sector employers seek from the graduates. This study implies the need for a stakeholder-responsibility approach in prescribing a comprehensive normative solution to the employability of graduates. In addition, it also postulates that the culture of learning and gaining varied skills in different spheres of life need to be inculcated amongst students from early years.

In Malaysia, there is a profusion of evidence of high graduate unemployment since many graduates are found lacking of what are needed to acquire and to maintain their jobs. In this paper, graduate employability skills were analyzed based on four major criteria: qualification, academic score, experience and specific soft skills. The data and information used were extracted from 300 online job advertisements accessed via electronic databases at http://www.JobStreet.com.my from January to March 2011. A simple checklist form was developed to quantify the information from ads into quantitative data that was later keyed in the Statistical Package for Social Science for descriptive analyses. Based on the data, it was concluded that graduates with bachelor degrees were more likely to be employable due to high demand. It was also found that academic excellence based on CGPA was not the utmost factor for graduate employability. However, since less than one-third ads were free from work experiences requirement, fresh graduates only secured a little chance to be recruited. Another factor that limited graduates employability was high demand of specific soft skills requested by employers, among which were graduates with high quality of communication/interpersonal skills, foreign language proficiency, ICT/technical skills, high spirit of teamwork and specific personal attributes. Results concluded that graduate unemployment rate will continue to increase unless the Higher Education Institution (HEI) and the graduates are prepared to sharpen their soft skills according to market niche. It is suggested that the HEI work more closely with industries, professional bodies and society through the establishment of university-industry link cooperation that will become a catalyst for soft skills enhancement.

Organization has always placed emphasis on the publics who would determine its life span. In the context of higher education institution, graduates are the main public whereby their marketability is the key measurement of a university’s effort in the human resources development. Hon & Grunig (1999) identify two types of organizational relationship from public perspectives. The communal relationship is said to focus more on the surrounding and balance effect whilst exchange relationship is more inclined towards organizational self interest from the viewpoint of the public. From a different perspective on these two types of relationship, what exactly is the correlation between the student’s soft skills as claimed to be the determinant of their future employability after graduation? This problem has definitely tapped the interest of researchers to conduct an empirical study in order to examine the views of a university’s final-year undergraduates regarding the relationship of university-student and relate it to the seven dimensions of soft skills, namely communication skills, critical and problem solving skills, teamwork skills, continuous learning and information management skills, entrepreneurship skills, professional moral and ethics as well as leadership skills. Perceptions from 115 students were studied through face-to-face survey method. Communal relationship was proven relationally positive with communication skills, critical and problem solving skills, teamwork skills, continuous learning and information management skills, and entrepreneurship skills while exchange relationship was inversely related with professional moral and ethics.

The study investigated perceptions of students and employers about the development of human and social capital in terms of intellectual development skills, personal development skills, professional development skills, and social development skills for self efficacy of university graduates. How students and employers were viewing the development of human and social capital for self efficacy of university graduates; which areas of development skills were relatively stronger; and which sectors of industry or discipline of study were more satisfied or worried about were the questions answered in the study. Students of 4 public and 4 private universities and managers of 65 companies from 12 sectors of industry listed with Lahore Stock Exchange constituted the sample. Data were collected through an adopted, 30-item survey scale which was found reliable at 0.930 Cronbach's alpha. Mean scores and correlations were calculated for the four sub-scales. One-Sample t-test, Independent samples t-test, and one-way ANOA were employed for significance and variance analysis. The study concluded that students and employers were not fully satisfied with the development of human and social capital for self efficacy of university graduates. Intellectual development skills got the highest position whereas personal development skills were found at the lowest position. Professional and social development skills were found in the middle. This situation reflects performance of universities below standards and speaks of under utilization of their potential for contributing to the development of society. Serious initiative for the development of human and social capital for self efficacy of university graduates was the major recommendation.

This article presents the background to a general increase in interest in developing the graduate skills of undergraduates in business in Australian universities. The change reflects the call from industry for greater emphasis on these skills; changes in the existing skills of students commencing a business education; and in the perceived role of universities in developing their students’ capacities. The aim of our project, “Embedding the development and grading of generic skills across the business curriculum” (EDGGS), was to develop new ways of successfully embedding these skills in the curriculum. This article outlines the research methodology and presents our project outcomes. The project has made a significant contribution to the development of readily accessible material for the embedding of generic skills in the business curriculum, as discussed in this and the other articles in this Issue.

A major question for the generic skills project (Graduate Skills, 2010) was how best to promote the development of these skills for students in business. This question has preoccupied educationalists for decades and a variety of strategies are currently in use. This paper reviews the literature in the area and proposes an additional approach to the development of generic skills ? the use of intensive workshops. Beginning with students and later incorporating teaching staff, a series of one- to three-day workshops were held at various universities around Australia. These were well received by both the students and academics who participated. Student feedback from the workshops showed they had improved their understanding of the four generic skills discussed ? critical thinking, teamwork, sustainability and ethical practice ? and had especially enjoyed learning in a socially interactive and challenging environment. These results suggest that the workshop model has considerable potential either in stand-alone form or as a complement to an existing strategy for generic skills development.

The success of a software project depends on many factors. It requires project team members to be well-equipped with technical knowledge and good soft skills. Among the many soft skills, the two basic soft skills that all project team members should possess are communication and negotiation skills. Today, communication skills are found to be lacking among the university graduates. This situation has resulted in the unemployment of 3 942 information technology graduates in 2006. A study was initiated to incorporate the teaching of communication and negotiation skills in the Project Management (PM) course through team projects undertaken by members of multi-racial composition. This paper presents feedback from 67 students on the teaching of communication and negotiation skills, and project management concepts through team projects.