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This study seeks to ascertain whether there are regional gender differences in vocational education in Bulgaria at the upper secondary level and to shed more light on the main factors for the (non-)emergence of these differences. The research has drawn on data from the National Statistical Institute and the Centre for Information in Education in Bulgaria as well as a nationally representative school-leavers survey (2014); it has applied descriptive statistics and multilevel modelling for the data analysis. Overall, the present study demonstrates that the regional dimension is indispensable for understanding the development of vocational education and gender differentiation in education. The analysis provides evidence that the mechanism by which the education system contributes to regional gender segregation in vocational education is its opportunity structures at the regional level, which are related to vocational education offers. In addition, we found a positive association between industrial development and the share of women in engineering at the regional level.

The alignment between the labour market and initial vocational education and training (IVET) is placing always more importance on technical knowledge and skills, whilst metacognitive competences such as critical thinking and media literacy are increasingly neglected. In the context of IVET, this results in authors and practitioners paying always more attention to how to devise possible training interventions, with the double aim of implementing their educational pathways and enhancing students’ critical thinking and media literacy. This paper aims to report the state of the art concerning such processes of enhancement in IVET students.

The study adopted the method of systematic scoping review to address the research questions on how to enhance critical thinking and media literacy in the context of IVET.

The paper presents the analyses of the n = 19 contributions collected. Then, it proposes an initial conceptualization of the dimensions of critical thinking and media literacy. Moreover, by combining evidence from various contributions, the review proposes implications for educational practices and strategies. Around these pieces of knowledge, further avenues of research and practice are proposed.

This study contributes to the literature on critical thinking and media literacy in the context of IVET by advancing initial comprehensive conceptualizations of the two dimensions. Moreover, the study advances initial practical implications for teachers and trainers for the development of training interventions.

The originality of the present review rests in its proposal of definitions of critical thinking and media literacy; moreover, it widens the discussion of practices on how to enhance such metacognitive competences. Indeed, the study identifies the teaching and training practices meant to enhance critical thinking and media literacy and proposes applied implications in the context of IVET.

Intravesical therapy (IVeT) plays an increasingly important role in contemporary management of “high‐risk” superficial bladder cancer. Through audit this study aims to highlight points in patient care where improvements could be made. Based on preliminary audit data the authors developed a novel, integrated patient‐care pathway (ICP) to target areas of weakness. The impact of ICP implementation was then assessed prospectively.

The clinical course of 60 patients receiving IVeT was examined (34 men, 16 women; mean age: 73 years, range 52‐96). Complete data were available for 50 patients (mean follow‐up 51 months, range 6‐256; preliminary audit n=30, re‐audit n=20). In total 444 instillations of IVeT were administered.

Initial data highlighted several areas of deficiency including poor communication, inadequate urinalysis, low treatment compliance, delayed cystoscopic re‐evaluation and deficiencies in follow‐up. After implementation of the ICP, re‐audit confirmed marked improvements in all variables examined.

By rapid implementation of a simple, reproducible and comprehensive process of documentation the paper has demonstrated meaningful improvements in standards of care for this complex group of patients.

Through rigorous audit the paper identified areas of poor performance in the management of patients receiving IVeT. Using these data the authors modified clinical practice and strengthened the authors service provision for patients with “high‐risk” superficial bladder cancer.

The paper seeks to explore the career attitudes, motivations and behaviours of young people in initial vocational education and training (IVET) in Europe.

This exploratory web‐based survey was conducted during the European year for mobility. Drawing on existing research on the motivators of international careers, it explored young people's perceptions of barriers and incentives to mobility.

The study differentiates “natives” (those who did not go abroad) and “boundary crossers” (those who did). Cultural exposure, travel and a desire for adventure are key motivators. Counter‐intuitively, those who chose not to go abroad are significantly more positive about the potential for professional development but are significantly more concerned for personal safety. Some maturational trends are apparent.

The study is limited to a “European‐wide” perspective from a sample, which had access to the web survey. Further research could usefully explore differences in attitude and mobility behaviours within and across specific European countries.

Factors restricting boundary‐crossing behaviour may be rooted in aspects of psychological mobility such as perceived benefits of the experience, self‐confidence and risk aversion. This has practical implications for policy makers and career development for early career foreign didactic experiences where support for placements may need to focus more on psychological mobility, an area currently under‐researched.

This exploratory paper provides data to examine the mobility behaviours among young people in IVET, distinguishing between “natives” and “boundary crossers”. It presents an important attempt to more fully understand the dynamics of mobility attitudes and behaviours among young people.

This article focuses on the assessment of entrepreneurship competence by selected vocational teachers in Italy. The exploratory research question addresses the extent to which entrepreneurship assessments are competence based, and the research seeks to identify fully fledged assessment programmes with both a formative and summative component, and the use of assessment rubrics. It also explores the extent to which entrepreneurship competence is referred to in school documentation and later assessed, and the tools and strategies used for such assessment.

This case study is part of a larger European research project promoted by Cedefop; in Italy it focused on six selected vocational IVET and CVET programmes and apprenticeship schemes. It used a wide range of instruments to ensure triangulation and multiple perspectives: analysed policy documents and undertook online interviews with experts and policy makers. At VET providers' premises it deployed: analysis of school documents; observations of learning environments; interviews and focus groups with (in schools) teachers, directors and vice directors, learners and alumni (in companies) instructors, company tutors and employers, apprentices and alumni.

Assessment tasks were rarely embedded within fully fledged assessment programmes involving both formative and summative tasks, and assessment rubric for grading. Most of the time, entrepreneurship programmes lacked self-assessment, peer assessment and structured feedback and did not involve learners in the assessment process. Some instructors coached the students, but undertook no clear formative assessment. These findings suggest institutions have a testing culture with regard to assessment, at the level of both policy and practice. In most cases, entrepreneurship competence was not directly assessed, and learning outcomes were only loosely related to entrepreneurship.

One limitation concerned the selection of the VET providers: these were chosen not on a casual basis, but because they ran programmes that were relevant to the development of entrepreneurship competence.

At the policy level, there is a need for new guidelines on competence development and assessment in VET, guidelines that are more aligned with educational research on competence development. To ensure the development of entrepreneurship competence, educators need in-service training and a community of practice.

So far, the literature has concentrated on entrepreneurship education at the tertiary level. Little is known about how VET instructors assess entrepreneurship competence. This study updates the picture of policy and practice in Italy, illustrating how entrepreneurship competence is developed in selected IVET and CVET programmes and apprenticeships.

DURING the past eight or ten years the speeds of most types of aeroplanes have been practically doubled. Part of this impressive advance has resulted from the use of increased power, but most of it has come from the reduction of aerodynamic drag. The largest and most obvious “built‐in head winds” such as exposed engine cylinders, landing gear struts and wires were first eliminated and attention was then directed to successively smaller factors. The stage has now been reached where it is necessary to consider the effects on drag of such items as rivets, sheet‐metal joints and other irregularities on the surfaces exposed to air flow.

To highlight guidance issued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the benefit of investment advisers regarding certain obligations under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 (Advisers Act) and the rules thereunder.

Summarizes recent guidance regarding issues related to several challenging Advisers Act requirements, including inadvertent custody and client account transfers under Advisers Act Rule 206(4)-2, the use of participating affiliate arrangements pursuant to the “Unibanco” no-action letters, unique considerations affecting automated advisers (i.e., “robo-advisers”), the top five most frequently identified compliance topics identified in examinations conducted by the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE), and recent guidance regarding the private fund regulatory filing Form PF.

This guidance may assist advisers in preparing for regulatory examinations and questions from institutional investors. While the recent guidance addresses important topics, the guidance also raises some practical questions.

Practical guidance from experienced securities and financial services lawyers.

Here in the early days of the 21st century, we are hearing those voices around us, which long for the return of the charismatic, individualistic leaders of earlier times. Where are the so-called “leaders of men,” the giants of politics and industry who can safely show us the way? We used to be able to recognize them more easily; they stood tall, took little heed of other people's opinions, and spoke authoritatively like him-who-is-tobe-obeyed. But somewhere around New Year's 2000 (or was it earlier?), these titans seem to have become less individualistic. Leadership today seems to be more of a combination of great minds rather than any single intellect. We have come to realize that leaders simply do not and cannot stand alone.

In his book, Organizing Genius, Warren Bennis (1997) titles the first chapter “The End of the Great Man” and argues that the day of the individualistic, charismatic leader is now past:

The myth of the triumphant individual is deeply ingrained in the American psyche.... In our society leadership is too often seen as an inherently individual phenomenon. And yet we all know that cooperation and collaboration grow more important every day. A shrinking world in which technological and political complexity increase at an accelerating rate offers fewer and fewer arenas in which individual action suffices. Recognizing this, we talk more and more about the need for teamwork (p. 1).

The vastness and complexity of the task in the new century now requires leaders to see far beyond their own individual perspectives, no matter how wise or impressive they may have seemed. To add to Bennis' technology and political complexity, Moran, Harris and Stripp (1993) add culture, rapid change and the shifting nature of work:

The human family and global business in particular are increasingly intercultural and interdependent. We are in passage from a work culture that conditioned most of us when the Industrial Revolution recast our physical world and reality through mechanization, quantification, and consolidation. We are in transit to a Knowledge Society, dominated by high technology and information processing, a culture marked by mediation (describing and interpreting our world), by simulation and virtual reality (VR), and by circularity (events whipping around us, interacting and shaping experiences). In these circumstances, between epochs, everything we do is cross-cultural and dynamic. (pp. 10–11).

This chapter will focus on what happens to business leadership in an environment like that just described. Clearly the “triumphant individual” is rare, organizational hierarchy is being flattened, team process takes center stage, globalization makes organizations and teams international, and the various electronic communication media become the environment of the new reality. The approach of this chapter will be, first, to examine some of the issues of virtual teams — the challenges, problems and solutions, payoffs, technology, and the array of human, economic, political and even philosophical issues they raise. Secondly, we move to an analysis of three areas of difficulty that face global leadership in the virtual environment: culture, trust and collaboration. As part of this analysis, we suggest strategic approaches for executives to employ in order to solve and preempt some of these problems.

The emergence of “virtual teams” (VT) has become one of the hottest topics in business management literature. And in that literature the subject of leadership comes up often. When it does, however, it is much more likely to discuss middle managers and team members.

What this literature does not talk about much is what goes on with executives in the new virtual environment of global teams. On one hand, Bennis' “triumphant individual” is passes on the other hand, executives are still around and functioning as the top leaders of organizations. Although we shall see that most of the research and writing on virtual teams has been done on teams that operate deeper in the organization, it is nevertheless true that senior leaders of international organizations must also collaborate in a virtual environment. The collective knowledge of executive leadership teams plays itself out in a virtual, mediated environment to set the direction and strategy of the entire enterprise. These executive virtual teams may find the challenges of time and space to be even greater, with attendant increases in peril to the organization.

We want to look carefully and strategically at the needs and challenges facing executive teams who utilize electronic media to run international businesses from widely scattered locations. Our concern is with the international virtual executive team (IVET).

The authors’ aim is to establish the variance of youth welfare citizenship regimes in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and to revisit the applicability of the regime approach to the emerging welfare regimes (EWRs).

The empirical analysis follows the descriptive case study strategy aiming to discover diversity of youth welfare citizenship patterns. The case selection is made within the CEE country group, which includes countries in Central Europe, the Baltics, Eastern Europe and Southeast Europe, all sharing the communist past. The subdivision of these countries in reference to the welfare states can be made via the European Union (EU) membership based on the assumption that EU social policy frameworks and recommendations have an important effect on domestic policies. We included countries which are in the EU, i.e., with a similar political and economic transition path. There were three waves of accession to the EU in CEE countries. In the first wave (2004), all the Baltic countries, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia joined. In the second wave (2007), Romania and Bulgaria joined. Finally, Croatia joined the EU in 2013. Altogether 11 CEE countries are the EU members today, the remaining CEE countries are non-EU members and thus are excluded from the current research. Those countries which are part of the EU share similarities in social and economic reforms during the pre-accession period and after in order to reach a comparatively similar system with other member states. So, in terms of casing strategy these six countries can be named as emerging welfare regimes (EWRs) evolving transformations across different public policy areas. Handpicking of six countries out of 11 relies on the assumption that the Anglo-Saxon welfare system characteristics are more evident in the Baltic countries (Aidukaite, 2019; Aidukaite et al., 2020; Ainsaar et al., 2020; Rajevska and Rajevska, 2020) and Slovenia, while in Bulgaria and Croatia certain outcomes reflect the Bismarckian principles of social security (Hrast and Rakar, 2020; Stoilova and Krasteva, 2020; Dobrotić, 2020). This brings important variety into our analysis logic. Last but not least, we juxtapose six CEE EWR countries under analysis with six mature welfare regime countries representing different welfare regime types. Those mature welfare regime countries (Finland, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, UK) are not an explicit object of the study but help to put analysed CEE EWR cases into larger context and thus, reflect upon theoretical claims of the welfare regime literature.

The authors can confirm that the EWR countries can be rather well explained by the welfare citizenship typology and complement the existing knowledge on youth welfare regime typology clusters in the Western Europe. Estonia is clustered close to the Nordic countries, whereas Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia and Slovenia are close to the Bismarckian welfare model despite rather flexible, non-restricted educational path, universal child and student support. Bulgaria is an outlier; however, it is clustered together with mature Mediterranean welfare regimes. Former intact welfare regime clusters are becoming more diverse. The authors’ findings confirm that there is no any intact cluster of the “post-communist” welfare regime and Eastern European countries are today “on move”.

Altogether 11 CEE countries are the EU members today. The remaining CEE countries are non-EU members and thus are excluded from the current research. Those countries which are part of the EU share similarities in social and economic reforms during the pre-accession period and after in order to reach a comparatively similar system with other member states. At least one CEE country was chosen based on existing theoretical knowledge on the welfare regime typology (Anglo Saxon, Beveridgean, Bismarckian) for the Post-communist country groups.

In the social citizenship dimension we dropped social assistance schemes and tax-relief indices and included poverty risk and housing measures. Youth poverty together with housing showed rather clear distinction between familialized and individualised countries and thus, made the typology stronger. In the economic dimension the preliminary picture was much fuzzier, mainly due to the comprehensive education in the region and intervention of the EU in domestic ALMPs (and VET) reforms. The authors added a new indicator (pro-youth orientation of ALMP) in order better to capture youth-sensitivity of policy.

The authors included a working poverty measure (in-work poverty rate) in order to reflect labour market insecurity as an increasing concern. Yet, the analysis results were still mixed and new indicators did not help locating the regime types.

In order to improve the validity of the youth welfare citizenship regime economic dimension, Chevalier's (2020) model may also be worth revisiting. The authors argue that this dichotomy is not sufficient, because inclusive type can have orientation towards general skills or occupational skills (i.e. monitored or enabling citizenship clusters), which is currently ignored. Chevalier (2020) furthermore associates inclusive economic citizenship with “coordinated market economies” (referring to Hall and Soskice, 2001), which seems hardly hold validity in the Nordic and at least some CEE countries.

BEFORE the actual construction of a hull is begun, all the lines on the blue prints must be reproduced to full scale on a scrive board. This is called “setting out,” or in some shops “developing.”