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The purpose of this study is to investigate manufacturing industry leaders’ perspectives on the prevailing skills gap in the current Illinois workforce. The insights gained hold significant importance for the emerging generation of workers, helping them discern the essential proficiencies and plan their educational and career paths in response.

Guided by Becker’s (1962) human capital theory (HCT) framework, a qualitative study was conducted to identify the skills gap and explore the perspectives of manufacturing industry leaders. Fourteen industry leaders participated in this study, representing various occupational industries.

The findings underscore the prominence of the skills gap as perceived by manufacturing industry leaders, with notable aspects including limited durable skills and difficulty transitioning from content-based knowledge to practical skills.

The findings of this study can offer insights to researchers, scholars and practitioners in the field of human resource development, as well as to leaders in the manufacturing industry who aim to address the skills gap. Furthermore, this research can inform policy decisions and assist higher education institutions in preparing students for careers in the industry.

This study aims to investigate the growing use of financial metrics (such as return on investment [ROI]) to measure performance and evaluate human capital (HC) investments.

The research employed an embedded case study approach, examining how one ROI approach was applied to evaluating HC investments, across three sectors (corporate, public health and international development).

Three major findings emerged in this study: First, interpretations of ROI can lead to ambiguity during implementation. ROI is interpreted trichotomously – metaphorically, as a desire for value; literally, as a metric; and procedurally, as a method for planning and evaluating HC investments. Second, understanding, measuring and tracking the domains of people performance (cognitive, affective and psychomotor) is vital to evaluating the impact of HC investments because this is where the change in behavior occurs. Third, although the logic model measures the change in process following an intervention (input-activity-output-outcome-impact), other approaches measure the change in behavior of people in the intervention (people performance).

These findings provide clarity for practitioners about challenges when applying ROI.

This is the first study to explore how the ROI financial metric is applied in a new domain by first examining its interpretation. It elucidates the use of ROI in practice, as well as the different purposes of key ROI approaches.

This study presents a model for assessing the effects of employee ICT training on organizations’ results. It also introduces digital transformation as a mediator between the two concepts and studies the role of organizational commitment and human capital in terms of digital transformation.

Surveys were completed by the CEOs of 184 Spanish companies, and their responses were analyzed with Partial Least Squares.

The results empirically analyze the proposed theoretical model and highlight the fact that human capital and organizational commitment partially mediate the link between ICT training and digital transformation. Furthermore, there is a direct relationship between ICT training and company performance.

Directors and managers should invest more resources in the human capital of their company through ICT training. In fact, it can improve organizational commitment, encouraging employees to adopt innovative behaviors, thus allowing for the necessary digital transformation.

Despite heavy theoretical emphasis on the study of the conditions necessary for the digital transformation of companies, few studies have empirically analyzed the effects of adopting certain practices for its implementation. This paper focuses on analyzing the effect of ICT training, which is configured as a tool capable of improving staff knowledge and increasing employee commitment. This is essential for adopting organizational change such as digital transformation.

Several factors and forces in school-level leaders' work can heighten emotions and incite emotionally charged situations. Challenges that heighten school-level leaders' emotions are related to systemic factors, people factors and personal factors. The extent to which each of these different factors influence the emotional experiences of school-level leaders, and whether that influence ends up being positive, negative or neutral, is contextual in nature. The systemic factors include encountering barriers when advocating for students, managing an intensified and expanding workload, working within disorienting policy contexts, and receiving a lack of support from their employer. Changes in school-level leaders' work and workload due to the COVID-19 pandemic that heightened emotions and emotional labour are also considered when discussing the systemic factors. People factors evident in the literature include workplace conflict, gendered power relations and crises and tragedies in the school community. The emotional labour inherent in school-level leadership comes to the forefront when considering the impact of these people factors on emotions at work because school-level leaders are tasked with making decisions that can have an immense impact on peoples' lives. Personal factors discussed in this chapter surround a school-level leader's individual emotional intelligence abilities and media attention directed towards them.

Healthy and adaptive strategies for regulating emotions and coping with the demands of their jobs can help school-level leaders mitigate the factors and forces heightening the emotional aspects of their work, stave off the negative effects of work intensification and achieve wellness. As with most individuals in most professions, school-level leaders use several different strategies to manage their emotions and cope with the stresses associated with their work. Some of these coping strategies are associated with positive outcomes including situation selection and exercising autonomy over their workday, talking to colleagues, reappraisal, humour, controlled breathing, exercise and engaging in hobbies outside of work. However, even the most experienced and effective school-level leaders demonstrate a proclivity for engaging in coping strategies associated with maladaptive and negative outcomes. These maladaptive strategies include worrying about events over which they have little or no control, masking one's emotions using expressive suppression, using thought suppression to deal with symptoms of emotional exhaustion, distraction, manipulating the emotions of others as well as use of illegal or prescription drugs, alcohol and other forms of self-medication. This chapter concludes with a discussion of how there can be some overlap between these strategies in practice and how they are classified.

As Australians experience more fierce and frequent natural disasters, there are urgent calls for businesses to meaningfully respond to climate change. Australian financial and professional services employees occupy an ambiguous space as climate mitigation measures have different economic implications for their clients. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Australian professionals experience climate change and respond to the issue within their workplace.

This mixed methods study applies a systems thinking framework to investigate: how do professionals’ experiences of the issue of climate change and the workplace influence their cognitions, emotions and behaviour? And in particular, what psychosocial antecedents precede voicing climate concern?

Firstly, a survey of professionals (N = 206) found social norms, perceived behavioural control and biospheric values, but not attitudes, significantly predicted prohibitive green voice. Middle managers were significantly likely to voice climate concern, whereas senior managers were significantly likely to express climate scepticism. Ten professionals were then interviewed to gain a contextualised understanding of these trends. Interpretive phenomenological analysis identified five interrelated themes: (1) active identity management, (2) understanding climate change is escalating, (3) workplace shapes climate change response, (4) frustration and alienation and (5) belief that corporations prioritise profit.

Findings are discussed in relation to how employees may both embody and adapt their organisations. These results have implications for understandings of workplace meaningfulness and organisational risk governance.

Continuity of care and access to primary care have been identified as important contributors to improved health outcomes and reduced reincarceration among people who are justice-involved. While the disproportionate burden of health concerns among incarcerated populations is well documented, less is known about their health service utilization, limiting the potential for effective improvements to current policy and practice. This study aims to examine health status and health care utilization among men recently released from a superjail in a large metropolitan area to better understand patterns of use, risk factors and facilitators.

Participants included adult men (n = 106) matched to a general population group (n = 530) in Ontario, Canada, linked to medical records (88.5% linkage) to examine baseline health status and health utilization three-months post-release. The authors compared differences between the groups in baseline health conditions and estimated the risk of emergency department, primary care, inpatient hospitalization and specialist ambulatory care visits.

Superjail participants had a significantly higher prevalence of respiratory conditions, mental illness, substance use and injuries. Substance use was a significant risk factor for all types of visits and emergency department visits were over three times higher among superjail participants.

This empirical case is illustrative of an emerging phenomenon in some regions of the world where emergency departments serve as de facto “walk-in clinics” for those with criminal justice involvement. Strategic approaches to health services are required to meet the complex social and health needs and disparities in access to care experienced by men released from custody.

This study aims to ascertain consumption values of Muslim tourists, attitudes, satisfaction and loyalty towards a Muslim-friendly accommodation, which has gained recognition from the Malaysian Government. Subsequently, an overall Muslim-friendly image was examined as a moderating variable within the associated relationship.

A quantitative research design with a purposive sampling technique was chosen through a sample size of 378 people in Malaysia and distributed via social media. The respondents were selected based on the Muslim-friendly accommodation recognition (MFAR) initiatives, a procedure of accreditation which acknowledges Muslim-friendly accommodation for tourists. To obtain data from those travellers, structured questionnaires were used. SmartPLS was used for data analysis in this study.

The values which were found to have an influence on attitude towards a Muslim-friendly accommodation are related to social, emotional, economic, functional, monetary and epistemic elements. On the other hand, hedonic, conditional, Islamic and altruistic values were found to be insignificant in determining the attitude towards a Muslim-friendly accommodation. Subsequently, an overall Muslim-friendly image was found to moderate the relationship between social, monetary and altruistic values and its link concerning attitude towards the accommodation, while the rest of the relationships were not significant. More importantly, attitude seems to have an impact on satisfaction, as well as its loyalty towards a Muslim-friendly accommodation.

Firstly, it begins with understanding Malaysia, one of the developing countries in Southeast Asia. Secondly, data was collected from participants using a survey method, from purposive sampling which may limit the findings’ generalizability. Thirdly, this study focussed exclusively on the perceived value dimensions associated with Muslim-friendly accommodation, thus, disregarding consumers who may associate with other types of tourism and hospitality elements.

The results provide a fresh insight and a better understanding regarding the consumption values and all of its related components towards customer loyalty of the Muslim-friendly accommodation in Malaysia. In addition, the findings deliver new information and a deeper understanding of relevant values in Malaysia’s Muslim-friendly accommodation, which can be used as a standard guideline by industry practitioners, local and abroad.

This research supports service providers in developing effective brand management strategies for their own businesses. Apparently, this study discovers that emotional values tend to be the most important values in determining attitude towards Muslim-friendly accommodation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the studies examining the overall perceived Muslim-friendly image within the consumption values that are relevant from an Islamic viewpoint. It provides policymakers, as well as the industry players, some reliable approaches for enhancing Muslim-friendly accommodation.