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The purpose of this paper is to provide various perspectives on the future of quality professionals from a number of leading academics and practitioners around the world.

The approach taken was to collate opinions from a number of leading academics and practitioners from different countries. It was also important to ensure that all participants in the study had a good knowledge and expertise in the field of quality and operations management. Most of the participants had over 30 years of experience in quality and related disciplines and some of them are pioneers in their respective fields of quality management/engineering.

As the global economic forces were radically changing, it is essential that quality managers face the future with quality-based integrated management programmes that fit the new business era rather than continuing with systems that may have worked in the past.

Due to time constraints, the number of people participated in the study was relatively small. However, the author is currently pursuing a larger study looking into the future of quality professionals within the context of Scottish Manufacturing and Service companies.

The paper provides an excellent resource for many researchers and practitioners equally who are engaged in research and applications on this topic. Moreover it was observed during the review of current literature that very few studies are related to the topic on the future of quality professionals and their future roles in modern organisations.

This paper aims to study the future of the Singapore association of social workers using causal layered analysis (CLA) and the Futures Triangle. In today’s rapidly changing world, professional associations have to re-evaluate their roles to remain relevant. This paper presents an analysis of findings from a study on the level of alliance of social workers with their professional association. By critically examining underlying issues beneath common beliefs held by social workers that impede, promote or sustain change with their professional association, we can gain a deeper understanding into their level of alliance with their association. Insights toward current issues faced by the association as well as its alternative and preferred futures could be illuminated.

Inayatullah’s “Futures Triangle” was used to deepen the findings of the study on the level of alliance of social workers with their professional association from the lens of CLA (Inayatullah, 2004). The study employed interviews with 27 social workers in Singapore, selected through purposive sampling.

Alternative scenarios and preferred futures of the Singapore Association of Social Workers (SASW) that were postulated from the interviews reinforce a need for more targeted recruitment campaigns. It also calls for regionalization and globalization of SASW to maximize its potentials.

The paper suggests how a social work association might be able to reposition its role in relation to its stakeholders to promote and sustain itself. SASW could do so through positioning itself as the “National Geographic” beacon for social workers in Singapore to reach out to the world.

A number of prominent educators, executives of professional associations, and business leaders address the positive and negative characteristics of contemporary library education. They stress the need for professionals to have a broad understanding of the field, vision, orientation to the future, and a balance of traditional and new skills. Information professionals of the future must have a broad understanding of the organization of knowledge, communication and interpersonal skills, management ability, and orientation toward problem solving and decision making. They must also be able to analyze, synthesize, interpret, and evaluate information and knowledge. Technology is mentioned by all contributors to the forum; most emphasize the need for information professionals to be able to manage and use technology as a tool—a means to an end, but not an end itself.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the current profile of skills and knowledge of Australian logistics professionals and identify important requirements for the future.

The study targeted the population of 1,300 professional members of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport in Australia, employing the triangulation of both mail survey and in‐depth interview techniques. A total of 147 usable questionnaires were returned and seven interviews conducted. Data were analysed using the SPSS 13.0 software and thematic analysis technique.

It is found that all proposed business‐, logistics‐ and management‐related skills and knowledge are important for logistics professionals. Logistics‐related skill and knowledge set was found to be the area that educational and training institution in Australia should particularly aim at to further equip local logistics workforce with substantial skills and knowledge to perform their job successfully. In addition, universities and other training institutions should focus on developing and providing specific courses, especially professional development courses, to prepare logistics professionals with a broader skill set for the future.

The major limitation of this research is that the revised BLM framework has just been tested only in Australia. Future research direction is desired, e.g. conducting the study using the same instruments in other countries to increase the reliability and validity of the proposed revised framework.

Although this study was designed on the BLM framework, it has gone further to elaborate the framework and incorporated a number of additional skills and knowledge which are considered to be critical in the contemporary business environment, and thus it helps to enrich the contemporary literature on logistics knowledge and skill set for logistics professionals. This study is also of benefit to managers in logistics firms as they can identify important skills and knowledge to improve on, while policy makers and educational and training bodies can also use the findings from this research to design and implement courses which are necessary to facilitate skill and knowledge development for logistics workforce.

The authors examined the association between accountancy board composition in the continental United States and indicators of the supply of new accounting graduates. In particular, the authors studied the association between the number of CPAs as well as the number of college educators that serve on State Accountancy Boards (SAB) and two key indicators of the future supply of future accounting professionals – number of CPA exam takers and number of accounting graduates from AACSB-accredited accounting programs. The descriptive statistics by the authors show 30% of jurisdictions have at least one accounting PhD who serves on the board, and on average 75.6% of board members are CPAs. The authors found that both the number of CPAs and the number of accounting educators on SABs are positively associated with the number of CPA exam takers as well as the number of accounting graduates from AACSB accounting programs. This suggests that accountancy board composition might be an important factor in influencing the supply of future accounting professionals. This research suggests that more strategic focus on the composition of accountancy boards is one approach that might be used to increase the supply of future accounting professionals. This observation is important as the supply of accounting graduates has declined recently and the states, NASBA, the AICPA, accounting programs and firms are keenly interested in increasing the supply of new accounting professionals in the United States.

Multiple forces that shape the identities of adolescents and young adults also influence their subsequent career choices. Early work experiences are key among these forces. Recognizing this, youth service programs have emerged worldwide with the hope of shaping participants’ future trajectories through boosting engagement in civically oriented activities and work. Despite these goals, past research on these programs’ impact has yielded mixed outcomes. Our goal is to understand why this might be the case.

We rely on interview, archival, and longitudinal survey data to examine young adults’ experiences of a European youth service program.

A core feature of youth service programs, namely their dual identity of helping others (i.e., service beneficiaries) and helping oneself (i.e., participants), might partly explain the program’s mixed outcomes. We find that participants focus on one of the organization’s identities largely to the exclusion of the other, creating a dynamic in which their interactions with members who focus on the other identity create challenges and dominate their program experience, to the detriment of a focus on the organization and its goals. This suggests that a previously overlooked feature of youth service programs (i.e., their dual identity) might prove both a blessing for attracting many diverse members and a curse for achieving desired outcomes.

More broadly, our results suggest that dual identity organizations might attract members focused on a select identity, but fail to imbue them with a blended identity; thus, limiting the extent to which such organizations can truly “redirect” future career choices.

The goal of this chapter is to explore the requirements modern companies expect of HR professionals’ competences.

Departing from the widely acknowledged HR competence studies of Ulrich and associates, we extended them with the continuous learning competence profile and HR professionals’ individual job performance. The empirical study is built on open interviews with HR leaders of ten large Dutch companies.

The study offers a new set of HRM competences. This set includes six HRM profiles: Business Focus, Learning Focus, Strategic Focus, HR Technology, HR Delivery, and Personal Credibility. Several contingency factors are thought to play a role in supporting these HRM competences: company culture, strategy, size, sector, scope, and position of HR professionals.

Based on these contributions, we recommended conducting a quantitative study to gain understanding of the relevance of the individual HRM job performance and to find associations between the HRM competences and the individual HRM job performance.

The focus of this chapter is a combination of HRM competences and the individual job performance of HR professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the situated understandings that higher education students can offer on their employability, and to make sense of “employability” in industry and career context‐specific ways. The paper further seeks to explore potential critical reflections on emerging professional practice and future employment conditions.

Drawing on interviews and focus groups conducted with students located within a university‐operated industry‐facing media production studio, this paper focuses on how students articulate their career development and aspirations.

Discussing their studio experience and forms of “identity work”, students would nuance “employability” in terms of media industry‐specific concepts of creativity and professionalism. Anxieties around future professional practice were also voiced, signaling the potential value of a Career Studies approach that creates a space for explicitly exploring employment conditions as personally meaningful concerns.

Noting how employability is articulated in terms of industry professionalism, this paper encourages analysis that is attentive to situated understandings and identity work. Given the studio and media focus, application of findings may be limited.

Relevant for industry employers is how students make sense of their future career aspirations and undertake “work on the self” that is bound up with but also potentially critical of professional norms, quality of life and work conditions.

Recognising how employment can be understood in terms of “professionalism”, this paper suggests how an exploration of discourses and practices of professionalism can be part of a wider examination of employability. This paper explores the value of the Career Studies approach for integrating questions of student identity with subject‐specific accounts critical to employment conditions and practices.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the self-perceived influence of short-term exchanges in schools abroad on future foreign language teacher’s professionalization, regarding professional values and pedagogy and practice. It grasps students’ changes in the perception of values attached to short-term exchanges in a professional setting.

In the scope of the European project SPIRAL, four prospective foreign language teachers attended a two-week internship at schools in another country. This paper explores, resorting to a combined content and discourse analysis, their letters of motivation (two months before the exchange), emails sent individually to the local coordinator (one week after the arrival) and a focus-group interview (two months after the arrival).

Future foreign language teachers change their focus when referring to the values attached to their experiences at schools abroad: from an initial focus on language skills improvement, they come to value the intercultural pedagogic experience they lived, focusing on differences and similarities between professional values and pedagogical practices across the contexts.

A generalized introduction of professional exchange programs, both in pre-service and continuing teacher education, could improve teachers’ perceptions of global structural, educational, political and curricular contexts and demands. It would also help the teachers decenter from educational practices and professional habitus taken for granted, and raise their awareness of what it means to be educated and professionalized in other contexts.

Few studies have focused on short-term exchanges and their impact on teachers’ professional development. The present paper highlights the pedagogical, intercultural and identity-building potential of short-term exchanges in foreign language teacher education.

The Association of Professional Futurists (APF) recently held a scenario salon that explored the “Futures of futures.” The centerpiece of the findings was the identification and implications of four critical uncertainties affecting futurists and the futures field. First, is addressing the extremely fragmented nature of the field. Futurists must get better at working together more closely as a field to be successful. Second, is the need to confront our aging tool kit. It is not as if methodological innovation has stopped, but it is seen as largely incremental. Third, is the need for futures to create a unique value proposition that distinguishes futurists from mainstream consultants. Finally, there is the poor public image of the field. This suggests that there is a long‐term task ahead of careful rebuilding the brand of futures through a more sophisticated engagement with the public, especially the media. The APF has formed working teams around these issues. The APF sees a generation task ahead, but is confident that together with our futurist colleagues, we can achieve our goal of a “credible profession, thriving professionals.”