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This paper aims to determine the impact of mentorship on the development of self-directedness among beginner teachers in their initial years of teaching.

The researcher adopted a positivist paradigm to explore the situation of concern. Quantitative research was conducted, involving the collection and analysis of numerical data. Two closed-ended structured questionnaires were utilised, derived from the 40-item self-directed learning readiness scale (SDLRS) developed by Fisher and King, and a pre-determined questionnaire by Glazerman focused on the first-year teaching experience, induction and mentoring of beginner teachers.

Beginner teachers merely relying on the knowledge obtained from their studies is insufficient to achieve a satisfactory level of self-directedness when starting a teaching career. Most beginner teachers faced significant challenges in their early years of teaching due to the absence of mentoring support. In addition, most indicated that they resume their teaching duties and rely on their district for general support, guidance and orientation. Finally, the results have shown that mentoring positively impacts beginner teachers’ self-directedness.

The first limitation was that this study was narrowed to one South Africa University part-time B.Ed honours students working as beginner teachers in different provinces at primary and secondary schools. As a result, the findings of this research might be interpreted by some critics as one-sided and not representative of the views of most beginner teachers in South Africa who are working. The second limitation of this study is the sample size. In this study, 222 responses were received. As a result, the findings of this research might be considered not representative of the target sample size.

The presence and effective implementation of mentoring programmes in schools can positively impact beginner teachers' professional development and retention during their first years of teaching.

We contend that our research holds significance for international readership as it aims to garner attention towards potential research endeavours in diverse settings concerning mentorship programs for beginner teachers, specifically promoting self-directed learning. Our research offers opportunities to compare our findings with studies conducted in more comprehensive, comparative contexts and foster research possibilities in broader, contrasting contexts.

Based on the findings of this research, the availability and effective use of mentoring programmes would significantly affect beginner teachers' self-directedness, improve their retention rate and alleviate their teaching challenges. This study was the first research on the perceptions of the influence of mentoring on the self-directedness of beginner teachers.

Mentoring is an essential tool for teacher education, not least because it allows knowledge and experience sharing. Research findings suggest a close relationship between mentoring and the well-being of those involved. However, little is known about this relationship or the mechanisms involved. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned issues.

Through an integrative literature review, important links between mentor and mentee well-being and certain aspects of mentoring are explored. The results of the review are then synthesised into a theoretical framework.

The framework developed here posits that the well-being of teachers relates to the quality of mentoring. This includes teachers' perceptions of mentoring and their decision to get involved, their contributions to functional mentor–mentee relationships and the selection and use of mentoring styles that support both mentor and mentee well-being. Moreover, the framework hypothesises that the quality of mentoring received by mentees is related to their well-being, which is in turn connected to their professional development. Most of these relationships appear to be bidirectional, meaning that mentee well-being also contributes to mentoring quality and mentor well-being. Finally, it is hypothesised that the well-being of both mentors and mentees is connected to the school context in which the mentoring takes place.

This work provides a novel, comprehensive framework for future examinations of the connections between well-being and mentoring. It synthesises the prior work on this topic by integrating findings from both the mentor and mentee perspectives into a single framework.

The South African vocational education and training (VET) sector is required by legislation to redefine postsecondary education, advance industrialisation and expand the job market to address unemployment in the country. Yet, VET leaders' heterogenous educational and occupational backgrounds do not enable them to address the needs of the VET sector. Continuous professional development of leaders in the education sector needs to include support structures such as mentoring.

The present study sought to investigate how VET managers in South Africa perceive three different types of mentoring – individual, peer group and expert-based key performance area (KPA) mentoring – during a part-time professional leadership development programme. Using interactive qualitative analysis (IQA), the authors collected and analysed data from focus group discussions (n = 24) and individual interviews (n = 21) from two cohorts of the programme.

The results revealed that individual mentoring represented the most important driving mechanism, followed by peer group mentoring and expert-based KPA mentoring. Participants identified leadership as a prerequisite for their development. Emotions formed the final outcome of the mentoring framework.

Based on the findings, the authors suggest investigating the role played by leaders' interpersonal competences such as emotional competence in the workplace. Additionally, research needs to clarify if and how mentoring can support leaders to develop interpersonal competences in formal and informal settings.

The study offers empirical evidence on a three-pillar mentoring framework adopted in a professional development programme for leaders in VET in South Africa. It highlights the importance of individual, social and emotional factors.

Supply chain (SC) professionals and their competence play a key role in creating value and competitive advantage for companies. A considerable amount of this competence is developed at work, but little is known about how this takes place. Drawing on constructivist learning theory, the authors investigate how SC professionals develop their competence at work.

The study takes off from a theoretical framework of workplace learning mechanisms, followed by a series of in-depth interviews with an expertise panel of profoundly competent and experienced SC professionals.

The results provide detailed insights into the learning process of SC professionals. The key findings show that SC professionals use a wide range of learning mechanisms throughout their careers, and that the contribution and complexity of these mechanisms differ and change dynamically with seniority. The findings also show that learning mechanisms should not be viewed as isolated phenomena, but closely related to every-day SCM work as well as learning attitude.

By conceptualizing learning as a process, and congregating the fragmented literature into a framework of workplace learning mechanisms, this research provides a theoretical reference point for future studies. The empirical findings bring a new level of detailed knowledge on how SC professionals learn at work.

The results can assist SC professionals, HR managers and academic program leaders in their quest to develop competence in the field of SCM.

This paper makes a unique contribution to the human aspects of SCM literature by presenting the first study that investigates in depth the crucial but complex process of how workplace learning takes place for SC professionals in practice.

The current study makes two main contributions: one theoretical and one methodological. First, it investigated the theoretical prepositions of career sustainability perspective, which appears particularly suitable for examining project managers' careers' dynamics and patterns, featured by explicit and recursive interactions between individual, temporal and contextual factors. Second, the study aimed to adopt a qualitative approach to this topic as to allow a deeper understanding of individual narratives about careers, highlighting underexplored issues and peculiarities that future research could further examine through quantitative methodologies.

Project managers' careers are still an under-researched topic, especially through qualitative methods. The study applied career sustainability theory to the realm of project management, moreover, adopting a socio-constructivist perspective. Participants were 50 Italian project managers who were involved through a narrative in-depth interview that focused on career and career success. Their answers were analyzed through thematic analysis of contents and diatextual analysis.

Results showed that project managers' career could be a prototypical example of sustainable career, basically described in terms of four basic constitutive dimensions as follows: time frame, social space, agency and meaning. Implications for both future theoretical expansion of career sustainability theory and project managers' career management interventions were also discussed.

The originality of the paper could be found in the effort to adopt a socio-constructivist perspective to investigate the topic of career sustainability taking the exemplary case of project managers' career.

Many universities run Writing Centers to provide support for students wishing to improve their academic literacy. These centers are ideal venues for peer tutoring, which may benefit both student-tutors (through tutoring skills development), and those tutored (through opportunities to discuss writing with a supportive peer). In the context of a university in the GCC region, peer tutors, prior to working, must complete required Communication courses. The syllabuses reflect student-centered and collaborative post-process writing approaches, where scaffolding is emphasized over direction, and word-by-word instructor correction of student writing is de-emphasized. Peer tutors also undergo preparation aimed at equipping them with an understanding of the rationale for these approaches and the skills needed to adapt them to tutoring. Given these experiences, the researchers set out to determine whether tutors are able to articulate such understandings and apply them to tutoring. Interconnected interpretative methods were deployed, including tutoring observation, consultation-conversation analysis and semi-structured interviews with tutors. Results indicate that tutors have significant recent experience of non-directive writing classes and may be aware of the rationale and benefits of such approaches. However, in their tutoring, content appears to be transferred from their most recent experiences but their style relies on instruction predominated by telling, explaining, demonstrating and directing, reflecting formative experience at school. The relationship between tutors’ experience, preparation, articulation and practice is explored, and recommendations are made to enhance Writing Center practices, in line with the concept of a constructively-aligned instruction system where all components address the same agenda and support each other.

Applying traditional grounded theory techniques, the present research reanalyzed secondary data from four previously conducted studies to explore how generativity is manifested in young adults.

A new conceptual model of generativity was developed to depict how generativity manifests among this age group.

This study's findings provide leadership educators with a refined approach to interacting with this construct while simultaneously increasing young adults’ potential ability to experience the benefits available to them through generativity at an earlier stage in their lives.

This study advances the field of leadership education by establishing foundational insight into the uniqueness of generativity’s development in young adulthood.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how educators can teach the key competence of a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship (SIE) as a cross-curricular subject in compulsory education. It draws both on the literature relating to entrepreneurial education and on competence-based education to set out five features of entrepreneurial teaching. For illustrative purposes, these five characteristics are explored in a questionnaire put to a small group of teaching staff.

This study employs a qualitative approach, seeking to understand the personal perspectives of participants, and drawing out the complexities of their behaviour, whilst also providing a holistic interpretation of such behaviour.

The literature review identifies five features of entrepreneurial teaching: embedding learning outcomes for a SIE within taught subjects; active entrepreneurial teaching; educating for entrepreneurial attitudes; networking activities; being entrepreneurial as part of lifelong learning. It can be hypothesised that teaching staff teach different aspects of the SIE depending on the subject they teach (vocational or more traditional) and their role (teacher or workshop assistant).

Development of the SIE and the five characteristics of entrepreneurial teaching is a first step towards understanding how secondary vocational teachers and workshop assistants understand and teach the SIE as cross-curricular subject. In line with Fayolle and Gailly who called for deeper investigation of the most effective combinations of objectives, content and teaching methods, the paper seeks to establish a relationship between teaching methods, development of entrepreneurial attitudes and assessment.

This research paper aims to discover the elements of good physician leadership as perceived by physicians and to find out how the findings connect to the leadership theory.

The subjects (n = 50) of this qualitative study are physicians from four hierarchical levels (residents/specialising physicians, specialists, heads of departments and chief physicians). Content analysis with a constructivist-interpretative approach by thematisation was the chosen method, and it was also analysed how major leadership theories relate to good physician leadership.

Physician leaders are expected to possess the professional skills of physicians, understand how the work affects physicians’ lives and be competent in applying suitable leadership approaches following different situations and people. Trust, fairness, empathy, social skills, two-way communication skills, regular feedback, collegial respect and emotional intelligence are expected. As medical expertise connects leaders and followers, success in medical leadership comes from credibility in medical expertise, making medical leadership an inseparable part of good physician leadership. Subordinates are physician colleagues, who have their informal leadership roles on their hierarchical levels, making physician leadership a multidimensional leadership setting wherein formal leaders lead informal leaders, which blurs the traditional leader–follower boundary. In summary, good physician leadership is leadership through medical expertise combined with good manners, collegiality and traits from different kinds of leadership theories.

This study discovers elements of good physician leadership in a Finnish health-care context in which no similar prior empirical research has been carried out.

Educational policy instruments such as apprenticeship levy and forthcoming lifetime skills guarantee are creating unprecedented opportunities for rapid growth in a range of work-based learning (WBL) programmes, requiring increasingly complex levels of collaboration between providers and employers. Apprenticeships require providers to assume responsibility in ensuring apprentices’ work-based managers and mentors (WBMMs) are equipped to provide effective support to individuals as they learn ‘on the job’. After six years of higher education institution (HEI) apprenticeship curriculum delivery, there is opportunity to examine existing WBMM practice to inform the design, content and delivery of a shared knowledge base via a practical interactive toolkit. By developing clearer understanding of WBMMs’ experiences, expectations and challenges, the study aims to reduce potential gaps in knowledge and skills and encourage more effective collaboration between employers and providers to better support apprentices as they progress through WBL programmes.

This paper discusses evolution of higher level and degree apprenticeships, explores guidance for WBMMs and investigates the influence of expectations and motivations of WBMMS. Theoretical and conceptual foundations relating to WBL programme delivery and WBMM role are analysed and discussed. Qualitative data drawn from semi-structured surveys are analysed thematically to investigate common patterns, clarify understanding and identify development areas to inform future university provider and employer practice.

The findings suggest a number of themes to improve apprentice management; further clarity of WBMMs role, greater involvement of WBMM’s for negotiated learning, unplanned experiences do add value and scope for richer mentoring dialogues. WBL value for WBMMs is broader than expected, incorporating apprentice performance and output improvements, and solving complex problems.

The research is drawn from an established university with five years of experience. However, the context in which programmes are delivered significantly varies according to providers and employers. This means factors other than those highlighted in this paper may continue to emerge as the research in this field develops.

The practical implications from findings can be used to cultivate stronger collaboration, providing a foundation of knowledge intended to provoke further dialogue regarding content for an interactive toolkit. The findings signal the need for further resources, a review of the restrictions associated with levy funding for co-creation of a more effective national apprenticeship framework.

This paper builds on a limited body of research examining employers’ perspectives of apprenticeship management. Degree apprenticeships have attracted limited scholarly attention over six years since their inception (Bowman, 2022) resulting in a significant paucity of research that focuses upon employer role. This study addresses this void by exploring WBMMs experiences, requirements and expectations, revealing new insights for providers of WBL, employers and individuals employed as WBMMs.