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Graduate development programmes are a well-established strategy for recruiting graduates into the sector at the start of a lifetime public service career. There are indications, however, that public sector careers are becoming less secure and less long term in keeping with overall career trends across all sectors, a trend that has seen the emergence of employment contracts based on employability rather than job security. The purpose of this paper is to explore a graduate development programme offered by a state-based Australian public sector organisation to identify the extent to which it reflects and supports the shift to an employability-based contract from the perspective of programme participants.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 participants from three intakes of a public sector graduate development programme. Data were analysed through identification of first- and second-order themes as well as cross-case comparison.

Findings indicate that the one-year development programme partially supports an employability-based contract. The organisation could not promise ongoing employment and job security but did assist participants to develop skills and competencies for the future through its formal training and development programme. Work unit support for employability was, however, much more variable and depended to a large extent on line managers.

The study was conducted in a single organisation and only included current and past programme participants who were still employed in the public sector.

The success of the programme was largely dependent on job placement and level of line manager support. Addressing these areas through better programme design and management can support the development of future leaders through opportunities for enhanced employability.

The study extends current research on employability by exploring how a public sector organisation provides support for graduates in a developmental programme from a participant perspective.

The article attempts to determine whether academic research in the area of finance has a direct link to the practitioners in the field.

This paper used a survey of over 50 finance practitioners to ask their opinion on the relevance of academic finance journals to their respective jobs.

The results suggest that most business practitioners are more interested in proprietary research than in generally distributed academic research, the academic peer‐review process seems to reduce the interest of practitioners in academic research due to the time lag between the findings of research and their publication, and the statistical significance of academic research results does not interest practitioners as much as the immediate relevance of the research findings to their respective jobs.

A review of the literature suggests this might be one of the first papers to actually test the hypothesis that academic finance research has a direct transference to the finance industry.

For many years the demise of the graduate recruitment scheme has been predicted, some suggesting that dynamic employers want graduates that can take substantial responsibility and contribute to bottom line profitability within months of joining an organisation. Contrary to this view, some “blue chip” (organisation that if invested in, would be considered to be very reliable and safe and among the strongest performers in its sector) employers have retained their “scheme”, believing that hand picked recruits developed in(to) the organisational “mould” are more likely to achieve the medium‐ to long‐term results so desperately sought. This paper demonstrates that one such scheme produces greater career progression among scheme recruits when compared to graduates recruited outside the scheme. Further, this paper demonstrates that one such organisation operating such a scheme actively facilitates the personal development of such scheme entrants to generate enhanced career progression as a consequence of enhanced performance. The paper concludes that scheme practices could be equally applied to non‐scheme recruits to further enhance the overall performance of the organisation.

This paper aims to present a conceptual framework of how software teams can leverage the implicit information of implemented acceptance tests to cater to the needs of decision makers. The research questions on this framework were how business stakeholders can receive project status information in an intuitive way and how this framework can guarantee the traceability of tests to requirements.

The conceptual framework delineates the design of an acceptance test framework in three aspects: how the requirements model reflects the evolving states of requirement maturity over a project, how the acceptance test model becomes synchronized with the requirements model without a traceability matrix and how the acceptance test model communicates business value to the decision makers.

In an industrial case study, the presented framework yielded the positive effects of intuitive understanding by business stakeholders, high test coverage of requirements and distinctly reduced manual quality assurance (QA) work by automated testing for browsers and mobile devices.

The presented framework can help to convince business stakeholders to approve the budget for building a testing framework because it delivers them value as a status reporting tool.

This paper is the first to describe a step-by-step approach to solving a critical problem that IT departments frequently face. The solution consists in a new way of transforming the perception of a technical framework into a reporting tool for business information by intuitive design. The idea of mapping hierarchically corresponding abstraction layers can be transferred to other engineering domains.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evidence that suggests how working graduates' careers are actually being managed in corporate Greece. In order to shed some light on this issue, this empirical study aims to investigate the changing nature of careers from the employee's perspective, in various business contexts.

A survey was conducted using a structured questionnaire. Participants in the survey were 238 graduates working for firms across all sectors of the economy. Factor analysis was used to form career anchors/orientations, and career strategies from graduates' attitudes and statements reported in the survey. Regression analysis was applied for assessing the impact of alternative career orientations on career self‐management behaviors.

The main findings indicate that the primary source for shaping surveyed graduates' career strategies is their own career anchor/orientations. Other personal and organizational characteristics such as gender, age, work experience, field of specialization, economic sector and activity, firm size, and employment contract, seem to not have a persistent effect on respondents' personal career strategies. Furthermore, despite an emerging “new” career anchor, the traditional career of internal promotability still motivates graduates and leads them to pursue human capital accumulation and networking strategies.

Further research to extend the current investigation to employers and managers would allow for a more articulated discussion of the main sources of the influences on employees' career self‐management behaviors.

Given the dearth of empirical research on the changing nature of careers in corporate Greece, this study contributes to debates in the wider academic community on the issue of analyzing career self‐management behaviours empirically. The importance of combining the human capital perspective with the social capital perspective in modeling career development, is stressed by the present study.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of generational difference and reflect on how this might impact on organisational approaches to graduate development.

The paper explores the characteristics of Generation Y graduates and the implications of their entry into the workplace for organisations' graduate learning and development programmes, drawing on academic and popular literature and the organisational experience of one major employer of young people.

This paper presents a profile of Generation Y and suggests that the learning styles and expectations of this group are very different from earlier generations. Using its experiences of employing Generation Y the case study organisation suggests future graduate development schemes need to utilise the latest technology to deliver audio‐visually rich, multi‐tasking challenges which require a collaborative approach, offer instant feedback whilst at the same time recognising that its participants may not see the need for or indeed take responsibility for their own development or its perceived failings.

The paper suggests that further in‐depth research into Generation Y and organisational graduate development schemes is necessary to determine how far such schemes are meeting expectations.

Employers of graduates need to evaluate the effectiveness of their programmes.

The main contribution of this paper is to highlight how employers, and particularly graduate development managers, need to re‐examine their graduate development schemes to ensure they are not only meeting the needs and expectations of the organisation but also the individuals for whom they are designed.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a selection of papers on the subject of graduate training and development, covering current trends and issues.

The paper outlines the special issue which identifies developments in the field of training for graduates, recruitment, their transition to work, and their continuous development.

The papers discuss various ways that generational differences play in competitiveness and success among graduates and it is argued that “Generation Y” possess very different characteristics from their predecessor generations. Companies have become more wise to recruitment, managing the pool of talent with potential positions in mind.

This paper, a part of the special issue, considers recent developments in the field of graduate recruitment and development.

The purpose of this study is to explore employability skills that employers, university lecturers and graduates value to bring to the workplace, when graduates are applying for entry‐level graduate jobs in the field of computer science in Sri Lanka.

A total of three samples were selected for this exploratory study, namely, graduates, employers, and university lecturers. Three self‐administered survey questionnaires were developed targeting the three groups. In addition to descriptive statistics, paired sample t‐test, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and correlation analysis were used for the data analysis.

The findings suggested that there are differences in the priorities given for employability skills by the four groups – male graduates, female graduates, employers, and university lecturers. Further, the findings suggest that employability skills are influenced by the gender of the graduates. Overall, the findings of the study could be used to assist universities, graduates, employers, and career advisers in applying strategic decisions in managing graduates' careers.

Although a considerable amount of the literature addresses employability skills, much of the information is theoretical in nature and offers policy recommendations and prescriptive advice. Further, a majority of the research studies has primarily examined the experiences of a particular higher educational institute where remedial actions were taken to impart employability skills. The paper presents findings of a survey that investigated and compared employability skills that employers, university lecturers and graduates value to bring to the workplace when graduates are applying for entry‐level graduate jobs.

The aim of this article is to illustrate how employers have used more innovative “localised” strategies to address what appears to be “globalised” problems of attracting and retaining high calibre applicants with the appropriate “work ready” skills.

A series of interviews were held with HR managers, line managers from the various functional areas who directly supervise graduates, as well as at least one graduate participating in each of the development programmes.

The findings indicated that SMEs might struggle to meet graduate expectations on pay, but they appeared to provide effective mentoring and succession planning. This may further add weight to the argument that employers, especially SMEs, will use different strategies and have different priorities in comparison to larger global organisations. Overall, the paper concludes that sector is an important differentiating factor in terms of recruiting, developing and retaining graduates.

Several of the HRD strategies appeared to work well. There were problems with recruitment in some sectors, with innovative solutions developed, often using placement opportunities. Development opportunities were seen by some employers and graduates as a trade off for pay, while other issues such as travel to work and company culture were also a concern.

This paper is one of the first to research the issue of how organisations may use localised HR strategies in terms of graduate employability to get the most from local labour markets.

Five small Minnesota towns are examined one year after the arrival of six large discount stores. Three hundred consumers were surveyed to determine reasons for store choice and how the new discounters affected shopping. Findings indicate that consumers shop at discounters for low prices and large variety and specialty stores for the unique items they cannot find elsewhere. They shop at the new discounters more and the existing stores less. Specialty stores need to differentiate themselves from discounters by increasing product assortments in the key categories carried, upgrading quality with branded merchandise not available to discounters, and maintaining good in‐stock positions.