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Purpose – In this chapter I unpack the public workforce system, with a gender lens, to detail and assess its ability to provide job training and education to single mothers. Based on that analysis, I suggest strategies to develop job training policy that attends to the needs of single, working, poor mothers, and can help provide them with the education and skills training to raise themselves and their families out of poverty.

Methodology – Analytical review of existing policy and research.

Findings – With 1996 welfare reform, the United States “reformed” welfare policy so that recipients would be immediately attached to the labor market, and have a specified lifetime limit to receive public assistance. As a result, millions of single mothers are now working, but still poor. A companion piece of legislation to welfare, and what is the country's federal employment and training legislation – the Workforce Investment Act – does not provide single mothers with the human capital skills to escape poverty. The United States need a job training policy that actually does provide single mothers with routes out of low-wage work and includes attention to gender in constructing and implementing that policy.

Practical implications – The chapter provides recommendations to craft workforce policy in ways that will help women attain education and training in ways that acknowledge the complexity and structural constrains in their lives.

Value of chapter – The chapter presents a new vision for workforce development policy that takes into account gender and women's lived experiences.

Research on high-growth firms (HGFs) or gazelles is expanding due to their significant contribution to job growth and economic development. However, the knowledge about the conditions and factors that set these firms on their rapid growth trajectory remains fragmented. Therefore, this chapter provides an abreast inventory of the surging gazelle studies by systematically reviewing the international gazelle growth literature and consolidating firm-level, industry-level, and macroeconomic-level growth factors and their interactions as elaborated in the studies. Based on the review of 62 international empirical studies, this chapter finds that the gazelle growth is complex and multidimensional in its scope and nature. The firm’s growth intention and entrepreneurial nature emerge as necessary but not sufficient conditions to guarantee rapid growth as it results from the impact of and interaction between various firm-level and external factors. The different growth-influencing factors are summarized using a theoretical gazelle growth model, which supports the rare and temporal nature of the gazelle growth.

Engagement, motivation, and persistence are usually associated with positive outcomes. However, too much of it can overtax our psychophysiological system and put it at risk. On the basis of a neuro-dynamic personality and self-regulation model, we explain the neurobehavioral mechanisms presumably underlying engagement and how engagement, when overtaxing the individual, becomes automatically inhibited for reasons of protection. We explain how different intensities and patterns of engagement may relate to personality traits such as Self-directedness, Conscientiousness, Drive for Reward, and Absorption, which we conceive of as functions or strategies of adaptive neurobehavioral systems. We describe how protective inhibitions and personality traits contribute to phenomena such as disengagement and increased effort-sense in chronic fatigue conditions, which often affect professions involving high socio-emotional interactions. By doing so we adduce evidence on hemispheric asymmetry of motivation, neuromodulation by dopamine, self-determination, task engagement, and physiological disengagement. Not least, we discuss educational implications of our model.