Search results

This study examined the effect of COVID-19 on the acquisition of employable skills among national service personnel in Ghana.

The study adopted the cross-sectional descriptive survey design from the positivist paradigm to collect data from a sample of 2,263 out of a population of 77,962 trainees (national service personnel) posted to the public (85.1%) and the private (14.9%) sectors for the 2019/2020 service year. Sampling techniques were simple random, stratify and snowball sampling techniques and Google form softcopy questionnaire was used for data collection.

The study found that COVID-19 had made workplaces and work schedules very risky for trainees' acquiring employable skills in Ghana because their employers/trainers' were unable to provide adequate PPEs for trainees. Preventive measures such as mandatory leaves, reduced workload/working hours and shift system had reduced the duration for acquiring employable skills which could affect employability and aggravate graduate unemployment in Ghana. The sustainability and quality of job opportunities presented by COVID-19 to graduate trainees-farming; trading and online teaching could also not be guaranteed.

It was recommended that employers/trainers should provide adequate PPEs, introduce teleworking with the necessary tools and training for their trainees. Educational institutions should provide work-based learning methods in their curricula to enhance employable skills for national service graduates. Government's support for trainees venturing into self-employed job opportunities presented by the COVID-19 was also recommended

It was recommended that employers/trainers should provide adequate personal protective equipment (PPE), introduce teleworking with the necessary tools and training for their trainees. Government's support for trainees venturing into self-employed job opportunities presented by the COVID-19 was also recommended.

This paper has not been published anywhere.

Railway-level crossings (RLCs) are the point of intersection between rail and road users and are therefore hotpots of road-rail user conflict and catastrophic collisions. The purpose of this study is to assess the risks associated with RLCs and suggest probable reduction measures. Through questionnaires and visual inspection, the authors identify the safety risks, hazards and hazardous events at some railway crossing of Addis Ababa light rail transit (AA-LRT) north-south (N-S) route. The identified risky events are then categorized based on As Low As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP) principle and generic risk ranking matrix. The authors then examine existing safety management measures at railway crossing and assess the need for additional safety management. Five major crossings on the 16.9 km (10.5 mi) N-S line, starting from Menelik II Square to Kality, were considered for the study. This study is carried out by data collection from about 145 stakeholders and the application of statistical data and risk analysis methods. The major findings of this study and the recommendations for improvement are suggested.

The research followed a case study approach. Through questionnaires and visual inspection, the authors identify the safety risks, hazards and hazardous events at some railway crossing of AA-LRT N-S route. The identified risky events are then categorized based on ALARP principle and generic risk ranking matrix. Collected data was then analyzed using SPSS to deduce relationships.

The study findings reveal human factors as the greatest cause of accidents, injury or death. About 22% of hazards identified by category are human factors, whereas 20% are because of technical problems. Intolerable risks stand at 42%, whereas the tolerable risks are at 36% according to risk classification results as per the ALARP model. Because the process of risk management is a long-term cycle, its importance should not be missed at any time.

Because of design considerations of RLCs and the difference in generalized human behaviors for people of a given region, the results are limited to AA-LRT RLCs. This study opens a discourse for detailed evaluations, qualitative and quantitative analysis into the categorized identified hazards. There is also room for additional research into the performance of RLCs aimed at formulating standard necessary features that should be included on RLCs for proper risk control especially in emerging economies.

The research paper is original and has not been submitted for consideration to other journals.

This paper seeks to emphasise the need to re-evaluate university teacher recruitment processes. The implementation of lean processes helps to improve organisational practices; in the case of university recruitment, however, organisational processes have remained unchanged for decades. Although there is a traditional justification for having academic recruitment as a rigorous and complex process (as a practiced method by which to identify the most suitable applicants), the increase of competition across the sector, and the internet revolution, has rendered these older methods partially ineffective. The author argues that recruitment systems and practices need reviewing to overhaul inefficacious elements.

This is a quasi-literature discourse combined with the author’s experience in human resources management teaching and recruitment expertise at the Higher Education level.

Lean approach if successfully introduced to academic recruitment might reduce the effect of discouraged job seekers paradox and workload on human resources (HR) officers.

The volume of studies reviewed is limited, and therefore, more empirical findings are required in the area of lean recruitment.

HR departments of universities might consider practices that will improve the recruitment process and promote labour force participation.

According to the author’s knowledge, lean concept has been applied to HR (recruitment) for the first time in this study.

The global prominence of languages and Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, which supports the necessity of German proficiency for the nation’s socioeconomic evolution, necessitate a deeper understanding of German teaching in Saudi international schools. This study delves into the influence of various teaching strategies on students' German writing skills. The research particularly focuses on traditional and innovative methods and considers the factors that drive these teaching approaches.

Data were collected from 304 students in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, through a questionnaire. The relationships between teaching strategies and students' German writing abilities were analyzed using regression techniques.

The results indicate that both traditional and innovative teaching strategies positively influence students' writing skills. The regression analysis shows that the independent variables (traditional teaching strategies, innovative teaching strategies and factors influencing teaching strategies) collectively account for 68.9% of the variation in students' German writing skills. Even though a variety of techniques influence students' academic performance, the study’s findings indicate that several strategies – such as self-evaluation, pair work, oral feedback, grammar instruction and translation – have a major impact on students' German writing abilities.

This research brings unique insights into the German teaching realm of Saudi international schools, emphasizing the harmony between Vision 2030 goals and effective teaching methodologies. It elucidates the considerable influence of both traditional and innovative strategies on student writing outcomes. For educators in Saudi Arabia’s international educational environment, the study’s findings underline the importance of adopting student-centric approaches in the writing process, ensuring students evolve as proficient writers. Additionally, the research underscores the significant role of variables affecting teaching strategies, spotlighting their pivotal role in shaping student outcomes.

Feature selection is an essential step in data mining. The core of it is to analyze and quantize the relevancy and redundancy between the features and the classes. In CFR feature selection method, they rarely consider which feature to choose if two or more features have the same value using evaluation criterion. In order to address this problem, the standard deviation is employed to adjust the importance between relevancy and redundancy. Based on this idea, a novel feature selection method named as Feature Selection Based on Weighted Conditional Mutual Information (WCFR) is introduced. Experimental results on ten datasets show that our proposed method has higher classification accuracy.

Analytics technologies are profoundly changing the way in which organizations generate economic and social value from data. Consequently, the professional roles of data scientists and data analysts are in high demand in the labor market. Although the technical competencies expected for these roles are well known, their behavioral competencies have not been thoroughly investigated. Drawing on the competency-based theoretical framework, this study aims to address this gap, providing evidence of the emotional, social and cognitive competencies that data scientists and data analysts most frequently demonstrate when they effectively perform their jobs, and identifying those competencies that distinguish them.

This study is exploratory in nature and adopts the competency-based methodology through the analysis of in-depth behavioral event interviews collected from a sample of 24 Italian data scientists and data analysts.

The findings empirically enrich the extant literature on the intangible dimensions of human capital that are relevant in analytics roles. Specifically, the results show that, in comparison to data analysts, data scientists more frequently use certain competencies related to self-awareness, teamwork, networking, flexibility, system thinking and lateral thinking.

The study was conducted in a small sample and in a specific geographical area, and this may reduce the analytic generalizability of the findings.

The skills shortages that characterize these roles need to be addressed in a way that also considers the intangible dimensions of human capital. Educational institutions can design better curricula for entry-level data scientists and analysts who encompass the development of behavioral competencies. Organizations can effectively orient the recruitment and the training processes toward the most relevant competencies for those analytics roles.

This exploratory study advances our understanding of the competencies required by professionals who mostly contribute to the performance of data science teams. This article proposes a competency framework that can be adopted to assess a broader portfolio of the behaviors of big data professionals.

Identifying the frontiers of a specific research field is one of the most basic tasks in bibliometrics and research published in leading conferences is crucial to the data mining research community, whereas few research studies have focused on it. The purpose of this study is to detect the intellectual structure of data mining based on conference papers.

This study takes the authoritative conference papers of the ranking 9 in the data mining field provided by Google Scholar Metrics as a sample. According to paper amount, this paper first detects the annual situation of the published documents and the distribution of the published conferences. Furthermore, from the research perspective of keywords, CiteSpace was used to dig into the conference papers to identify the frontiers of data mining, which focus on keywords term frequency, keywords betweenness centrality, keywords clustering and burst keywords.

Research showed that the research heat of data mining had experienced a linear upward trend during 2007 and 2016. The frontier identification based on the conference papers showed that there were five research hotspots in data mining, including clustering, classification, recommendation, social network analysis and community detection. The research contents embodied in the conference papers were also very rich.

This study detected the research frontier from leading data mining conference papers. Based on the keyword co-occurrence network, from four dimensions of keyword term frequency, betweeness centrality, clustering analysis and burst analysis, this paper identified and analyzed the research frontiers of data mining discipline from 2007 to 2016.

The entrepreneur is the main decision-maker in small and medium-sized enterprises and is the principal force in the implementation of a firm's international strategy. Research has paid limited attention to the intangible aspects of human capital, namely behavioural competencies that may have an impact on the entrepreneur's ability to take advantage of international opportunities. This study addresses this gap, identifying the behavioural competencies that distinguish entrepreneurs who pursue a stronger internationalisation expansion beyond the European market.

A competency modelling process is implemented for a sample of Italian entrepreneurs. Data on behavioural competencies are obtained through the coding of behavioural event interviews administrated to the entrepreneurs. Export intensity is adopted as a performance criterion to classify the entrepreneurs.

Three behavioural competencies (change catalyst, teamwork and organisational learning orientation) emerged as more significantly activated by entrepreneurs who show a higher export intensity in the global market.

The exploratory nature of the study, conducted in a small sample and in a specific geographical area, may reduce the generalisability of the findings.

Entrepreneurs can become aware of the behavioural competencies needed for the implementation of internationalisation processes. Additionally, training programmes can be designed to promote the development of these behaviours.

Bridging the literature on international entrepreneurship, cross-cultural studies and competency-based research, this study highlights the role of behavioural competencies in the internationalisation process from a micro level of analysis. This article proposes a competency framework that can be adopted to assess a broader portfolio of entrepreneurs' behaviours.

The purpose of this research study was to explore the relationship between adaptive performance and work-related indicators of psychological well-being among ‘The Episcopal Church bishops.’

Hierarchical regression models were used in this research study to explore the relationship between adaptive performance and work-related psychological health.

There was a positive correlation between adaptive performance and work-related psychological health. Demographic factors did not correlate to adaptive performance. However, a negative correlation was observed between the years ordained as a bishop and the interpersonal adaptability dimension of adaptive performance.

Managing work stress has been revealed as an integral part of adaptive performance and satisfaction in ministry. Interpersonal adaptability and reactivity could be understood, then, as useful vehicles for increasing the capacity of bishops to manage work stress. In this research, the authors applied the Scale for Individual Adaptive Performance and the two scales Scale of Satisfaction in Ministry and Scale of Emotional Exhaustion in Ministry .

The results provided insights into the behaviors necessary for adequate development of bishops in their role. The religious landscape was becoming more challenging from a revenue generation perspective. The resultant complexity and the financial strain would necessitate the need for development of different models of ministry for long-term sustainability. This could further necessitate a different set of knowledge creation related to a set of behavioral capacities like those of adaptive performance. Such insights would assist in the promotion and development of greater work-related psychological health in bishops while deepening their ability to deal with complex and uncertain environments. Furthermore, this would increase satisfaction in ministry through improved workplace management skills.

Presently, very few studies empirically established the developmental needs of bishops as they entered, learned and grew into their leadership roles. Such insights would allow the formation programs for new bishops to be grounded in empirical data. Furthermore, this research study examined a largely unexplored population. This would provide a basis for a larger research agenda related to adaptive performance in judicatory leaders and their work-related psychological health. Consequently, it is posited that improved psychological health would result in better workplace learning.