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To gather insight into how graduating business students are preparing for the workplace and their future careers and how this has been impacted by COVID-19.

In total, 144 business students at an Australian university who had recently completed an internship and were nearing graduation took part in the study. Group A was surveyed before COVID-19 had emerged and Group B undertook their internships during a COVID-19 lockdown when the related economic downturn had become apparent. The responses were analysed using career construction theory (CCT).

This study concludes that graduating students do not generally place greater emphasis on career planning in times of economic downturn. However, they do devote more effort to job search and networking activities. They also display more career decisiveness and are less willing to seek out information about potential careers or their suitability for them. Their confidence in embarking on a career was not impacted.

This enables us to form a more complete picture of how graduating students perceive their work-readiness and the action they feel is important in order to improve their employability.

This has implications for career practitioners and employers of graduates as it adds to the knowledge of employability and the decision-making process in times of economic crisis and is particularly important for the tertiary education sector as it seeks to better target initiatives to aid employability in graduates.

The results increase the understanding of the impact of COVID-19 on early career development and argue that early-career decision-making is a specific area requiring investigation.

This research moves beyond a focus on employability skills and explores student perceptions of preparedness for graduate life in a more holistic manner.

Final-year business students were asked to outline their concerns regarding graduate life and the personal and professional challenges anticipated in their careers. The results are presented in the context of graduate capitals, which is a broader view than the more traditional skills-based approach.

The results indicate students do not feel underprepared for the workplace in terms of human capital, social capital, cultural capital and identity capital. However, many students feel inadequately prepared in terms of psychological capital and their ability to deal with the expected challenges of the workplace such as stress, long hours and the demands of a professional environment.

This study extends our knowledge of student preparation for the workplace and suggests research opportunities to better understand psychological capital development in graduates.

Greater confidence and a perception of preparedness may be increased for graduates if opportunities for psychological capital development and increased promotion of its importance are enhanced.

The results encourage a more holistic approach to employability in graduates and have relevance for all stakeholders concerned with graduate outcomes and workplace transition.

The paper presents work-readiness in the context of graduate capitals, which is broader than the traditional skills-based approach. It also focuses on student perceptions of their level of preparation for the workplace. This has enabled results which highlight psychological capital development as a key area in which students feel underprepared.

Universities have traditionally focused on imparting theoretical knowledge, which graduates then transfer to the workplace. However, the unpredictable modern workplace makes this transfer less certain. Whilst the gap between theory and practice has often been considered from an employer and academic standpoint, less is known about the graduate perspective. The purpose of this study is to determine the ways in which theoretical knowledge and practical experience interact for graduating students.

The views of 86 undergraduate business approaching graduation were gathered on how they applied theory to practice during their recent internship.

Graduating students apply theory that they have learnt at university through the direct application of fundamental knowledge and through workplace experience, which built on and deepened the knowledge accumulated at university. The findings indicate that there is, indeed, a gap between theory and practice but that employability skills may assist in the transfer process.

The research broadens the understanding of how theoretical knowledge is applied in practice and helps to determine if graduating students are prepared to meet the demands of an ever-changing workplace.

The results give us insight into how theory and practice interact for graduating students and give support to universities further exploring experiential learning opportunities for students and continuing to the development of employability skills.

The findings encourage a more nuanced debate regarding the role of universities and that both the provision of core theoretical concept and employability skills are necessary for graduates to effectively use their academic education in the modern workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to review the relevant literature on the causes of and regulatory reactions to the financial crisis of the last decade, popularly known as the “Global Financial Crisis (GFC)” or the “Housing Crisis” in the USA.

This review primarily focuses on the four main causes of the crisis, namely, excessive household leverage, securitization, corporate governance and credit ratings. The main reaction vis-à-vis recovery measures taken by most governments were quantitative easing (QE), bailouts and more stringent regulations of banks, though the discussion mainly focuses on QE.

In this paper, the authors summarize the literature on the causes and regulatory reactions to the GFC and propose future avenues of research for various topics.

Research on the GFC spans multiple disciplines as well as multiple facets of financial economics. A review paper such as this should help future researchers in generating ideas and gathering information for their research. Given that no review uncovers all worthy papers, the authors apologize in advance to the authors of any papers that the authors have inadvertently not reviewed in this paper.