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The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate the characteristics of good hospitality managers and the core causes that lead to developing such characteristics.

Using a qualitative inquiry approach, 93 line-level hospitality employees were surveyed online regarding their experiences about the characteristics of good managers.

The research findings revealed five key themes of good managerial characteristics, including interpersonal skills, communication skills, supervisory skills, leadership skills, and positive personality and professionalism. Additionally, the root causes of these managerial characteristics were also analyzed. The good managerial characteristics were perceived to have developed from having worked under either a great manager or a terrible manager.

This study advanced the literature on managerial characteristics by confirming several existing categories from the viewpoint of hospitality industry employees.

Human resource managers should be considerate of these findings in terms of recruitment, hiring, and training, development, and promotion of employees in their companies.

This is one of the first studies to analyze the perceived reasons behind the development of these characteristics.

This study aims to investigate how university students experience a skill transformation process aligned with the sustainable development goals (SDGs). This transformation occurs through their participation in a service-learning programme alongside an international volunteering project. The theoretical framework for understanding this skill transformation process is based on the “rite of passage”.

Qualitative methodology is adopted by conducting 23 online surveys with volunteers (virtual and onsite) and five with coordinators across the rite of passage phases. Volunteering was carried out in five Mayan indigenous communities in Mexico as part of an international cooperation project with the goals of supporting community-based tourism development and strengthening volunteers’ skills in accordance with the SDGs.

Results show that international volunteering programmes for university students significantly enhance their interpersonal and professional skills, demonstrating strong potential for implementing the SDGs. These programmes provide learning and education opportunities for both volunteers and local communities. Volunteers gain a broader perspective on gender equality and cultural barriers. Additionally, volunteering supports sustainable tourism, economic worth and collaboration among institutions. Both volunteers’ personal characteristics (educational level and sociocultural context), as well as their sociocultural context, influenced the perception of the skill transformation process and learning about the SDGs. Finally, a new educational university programme in volunteering aligned with SDGs is proposed.

This research examines the practical ramifications of incorporating volunteer programmes into university courses. Universities must include these initiatives in their educational systems as a means of enhancing student learning.

A new educational university programme in volunteering aligned with SDGs is proposed. This study suggests a shift in university mindset, as well as increased funding for training and adherence to the SDGs.

This study pioneers the rite of passage framework in an international volunteer tourism project facilitated by universities, emphasizing volunteering as a valuable tool for SDG implementation, considering the interrelationships between objectives.

Numerous studies have shown that minority workers are disadvantaged in the labour market due to stereotypes and discrimination. However, published research on résumé screening has overlooked the effects of multiple social categorisations pertaining to candidates' gender, education and origin. This study addresses this gap and examines whether the gender, the level of education and the national origin cues mentioned in the résumé affect the perceived employability of candidates.

This study employs an experimental between-subjects factorial design in that 12 résumés varying in gender, education and national origin were rated by 373 Portuguese working adults.

The results documented a gender premium as women were favoured in interpersonal and job skills but not in job suitability, and an education premium, since higher educated candidates were preferred despite their gender and origin. No meaningful interactions for gender × education × national origin were observed, which suggests that ingroup favouritism and outgroup discrimination in résumé screening can be averted.

The findings endorse a multidimensional view of perceived employability by investigating candidates' skills and job suitability from the viewpoint of the decision-makers, which extends our understanding of résumé-screening discrimination. This is critical to prevent hiring discrimination at an earlier career stage, which can increase youth employment and enhance the integration in the labour market of local minorities such as women, inexperienced workers and second-generation immigrants.

This paper investigates the integration of leadership training into IT curricula to develop current and future skills needed by the IT job market. The technical and non-technical skills required for IT professionals are presented and a conceptual model for including leadership training in technical courses is outlined. To implement this model, we adopted the Problem-Based Learning approach to teach an IT course. Qualitative and quantitative data were gathered, through a survey, from 52 undergraduate students in the College of Information Technology at Zayed University. Our results show that our adopted approach was successful in teaching IT skills as well as developing leadership skills. Given these findings, we highlight the importance and feasibility of integrating leadership development on a daily basis within technical courses to develop both the technical and non technical skills required by the job market.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the gaps between the importance perceived and the competence gained by the hospitality students in terms of the employability skills.

Questionnaires were distributed to 841 hospitality students in five regions in Malaysia. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data.

The findings show that there are significant differences between importance perceived and competence attained in teamwork, leadership, basic, technical skills and ethical skills. Additionally, the finding of this study indicates that the culinary and bakery students perceive that they are not given adequate exposure to possess such skills. It is important to ensure that graduates are equipped with the twenty-first century skills such as problem solving and analytic, decision making, organization and time management, risk taking and communication.

The findings provide insights to curriculum developers and policy makers on the appropriate interventions that need to be taken to improve the employability skills of the graduates.

An original contribution is made by linking employability model to TVET sector.

A fast-changing environment entails several reflections about skills and attitudes required to face the increasing complexity brought by the “glocal, liquid and networked” world in which workers operate (Bauman, 2003; Clarke, 2017). In the literature, an increased attention has been devoted to the impact of interpersonal skills and personal characteristics on employability (Heckman and Kautz, 2012; Succi, 2019; Wheeler, 2016). In this context, the so-called soft skills become of crucial importance, but a lack of academic attention devoted to their development, and a deficit of companies in integrating soft skills in their selection, induction and training processes have been identified (Hurrell, 2016). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

An exploratory study has been designed to describe the tools in use to assess soft skills, during the recruitment process and those to develop soft skills of graduates, during their first years on the job. In January 2017, two symmetrical online questionnaires have been sent to 500 HR managers and 240 graduates of a European business school, in Italy and Germany.

Results show that graduates and managers describe differently the use of tools to develop graduates’ soft skills. The large majority of HR managers indicate they offer formal training to young graduates and that they are involved in the performance appraisal sessions, while only 22 percent of students confirm they receive formal training and only 26 percent declare to be inserted in a performance appraisal process. Moreover, concerning the assessment of soft skills during the selection process, significant differences between Italian and German companies emerged.

This research constitutes the first step to acknowledge the lack of initiatives devoted to soft skills development, despite their rising importance for the job market.

Findings allow initiating a discussion about a strategic topic in human resources management: whose responsibility is it to develop soft skills? Should graduates, higher education or companies fill the gap? The study can be extended to other types of higher education institutions, and a qualitative research could deepen the understanding of root causes of the differences identified.

The impact on youth employment, reduction of labor skills mismatch and improvement of managerial practices could be interesting social implications of the study.

While previous research has predominantly focused on higher education executives and HR managers, this paper’s contribution consists in involving young graduates in the reflection on employability.

Many postdoctoral scholars are seeking professional learning and development (PLD) opportunities to prepare for diverse careers, roles and responsibilities. This paper aims to develop an evidence-informed framework for PLD of postdoctoral scholars that speaks to these changing career paths.

This paper used an integrated knowledge translation approach to synthesize and extend previous work on postdoctoral scholars’ PLD. The authors engaged in consultations with key stakeholders and synthesized findings from literature reviews, surveys and semi-structured interviews to create a framework for PLD.

The PLD framework consists of four major domains, namely, professional socialization; professional skills; academic development; and personal effectiveness. The 4 major domains are subdivided into 16 subdomains that represent the various skills and competencies that postdoctoral scholars can build throughout their postdoctoral fellowships.

The framework can be used to support postdoctoral scholars, postdoctoral supervisors and higher education institutions in developing high quality, evidence-informed PLD plans to meet the diverse career needs of postdoctoral scholars.

This paper aims to provide evidence that online well-designed educational tasks can provide more relevant and richer active learning environment for business English learners. The benefits of online tasks, as an education tool, became more apparent and gained more importance during the events related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The task design is based on task-based interactions and in a sequence of tasks with the support of an online learning management system (LMS). The findings suggest that online task-based learning (and would-be blended learning in the future) enables meaningful and authentic activities promoting interactions and communicative competences to prepare for learners of business English to enter the workplace.

The overarching aim of the study is to explore how task-design-utilizing online LMS could contribute to enhancing the learning process and to the development of the learner's communicative competences. The study included two aspects, namely: (1) the design of online tasks and (2) pilot evaluation. The task design involved tasks that required interactions between the learners. The pilot evaluation relied on data collection via questionnaires.

Two aspects relating to the findings: (1) a description of the teaching initiatives which was designed to see how blended learning and online tasks can enhance learning and develop the skills of the learners: with questioning techniques targeting communication skills, simulated workplace situations and timely feedback and peer influence; (2) the findings of the pilot study evaluation to see the actual implementation of online tasks. The students' responses corroborate the teachers' comments. The findings of this research showed that LMS tasks, which were designed for this study, helped the learners to enhance their competence in business English. Such competences included communicative skills needed for learners to enter the workplace such as interpersonal skills, presentation skills and negotiation skills in contexts. These findings lead to significant recommendations regarding the way forward for developing active blended learning.

Firstly, teachers need to be trained and involved in designing such online tasks and materials to be used in active blended learning. More training in language teaching methodologies should be investigated to adapt the transition from a traditional to a computer-assisted language learning teacher. This helps teachers to design and implement online simulated workplace tasks. Secondly, time for the use of online tasks should be allocated satisfactorily. This can be achieved by building online learning sessions into class schedule or developing active blended courses. The time for the use of online simulated tasks should be allocated satisfactorily with lab or simulation room, in which students would be shown how to access the online tasks designed on the university LMS and the way to practice with different kinds of tasks.

In this study context, the online tasks design can initiate at activity-level blending to support face-to-face (F2F) activities, for example, online activities to support tasks for the topic Make a request or Offer for help. This can be extended to course-level blending when more online activities are designed to use with F2F activities such as online comparing and contrasting tasks to develop skills in connections with the awareness of cultures. The findings of the research suggest to develop and to implement online tasks alongside with classroom learning and teaching to enable the objectives of business English programme at university for preparing learners to enter the workplace. The recent pandemic highlighted the need for effective methodologies for active blended learning. It is now required that professionals in higher education to collect evidence base to inform future practice of such methodologies. Further significant research efforts should be directed towards collecting such evidence of the effectiveness and improvements of such methods. The support of higher education management professionals in securing funding for such research will be essential.

This paper aims to investigate the interplay between international migration, soft skills and job and life satisfaction after returns.

The paper uses the dataset of Human Capital in Poland 2010–2014 representative surveys with 4040 return migrants, who worked temporarily abroad and returned to an origin in comparison with almost 70,000 stayers, who never worked abroad. In this study, Poland is treated as a strategic research site for the labor migration processes, which happened after the biggest European Union enlargement in 2004.

This study discovered that working abroad had a positive relation with cognitive, intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies, as well as job and life satisfaction. However, the relations differ depending on the key destination country.

This study discusses the implications for future research and practice, offering recommendations to organizations on how to embed employees with these resources in companies and how to support return migrants and their potential employers with the use of migratory informal human capital in personnel management and counseling.

This paper brings quantitative arguments about the hidden impacts of international migration on human capital by uniquely comparing the migrant population with the non-migrant population.

Skilled graduates delivered through vocational programmes are critical to ensure the future growth of emerging economies. This study explored students' reflections and experiences of online teaching and learning (T&L) during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa. The study specifically focused on the transferable skills students acquired and their relevance to working in the local retail and hospitality industries.

Following a case study research design, this study retrospectively delved into the multi-perspectives of students enrolled in vocational programmes. A total of 145 students completed reflective questions via a Qualtrics link regarding the topic in question. Student reflections were grouped and analysed for recurring themes using Atlas.ti. Through thematic analysis, two topical themes emerged related to transferable skills development and the usefulness of skills for future work.

The findings suggest that although students had to rely on online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, they still developed vital transferable skills, including communication, teamwork, organisational, self-management, flexibility, technology, metacognition and problem-solving.

The findings offer valuable input into planning and developing student-centric online courses to facilitate the development of desired transferable skills. Findings could also guide best T&L practices regarding how education and training across digital platforms could be used to ensure that graduates are prepared to navigate the future complexities of working in ever-changing globalised industries.

This study provides new insights into the evolution of T&L and how unexpected situations could provide an opportunity to hone desired skills and prepare students for employment and the 21st century workplace.