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Doctoral education (DE) is central to the development and application of operations management (OM) thinking. The European Doctoral Educational Network (EDEN) seminar on research methodology in OM is a structured initiative developed in 1999 by European Operations Management Association (EurOMA) and European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM). This intensive five-day seminar has run annually since and, to date, has engaged 486 students. The purpose of this paper is to ask: what role has the OM EDEN seminar played in the formation and academic career development of doctoral researchers, and how has it contributed to the development of EurOMA as a community of practice?

The authors developed a retrospective case on the design, launch and growth of the OM EDEN seminar employing two data gathering methods (collecting secondary and archival data, and a survey of four selected seminar participants) and a social network analysis.

The EDEN seminar is an effective educational intervention in developing doctoral researchers and their subsequent academic careers. The seminar has also contributed to EurOMA as a community of practice, bringing faculty together to teach, write and publish leading edge contributions in research methods for OM.

The case is focused on the OM EDEN seminar only, within which the survey is limited to four of the early participants. While another set of participants might respond differently in detail, the authors’ expectation is that participant perception of the role of the seminar would not change. The paper provides an exemplar for European academic associations to guide how they might explore the formation and academic career development of doctoral candidates within a community of practice.

The seminar merits the ongoing support of EurOMA and EIASM, not just in educating doctoral students but also in bringing faculty together to publish leading edge contributions to the OM domain.

The paper draws on the areas of student formation, academic career development and communities of practice to illustrate the role played by the OM EDEN seminar.

This paper is the first description, analysis and reflection on the role played by the OM EDEN seminar.

This study documents a new case of the further commercialization of the university, the rapid adoption of corporate partnership programs (CPPs) within centralized university career services departments. CPPs function as a type of headhunting agency. For an annual fee they facilitate a corporate hiring department’s direct access to student talent, allowing the company to outsource much of its hiring tasks to the university career center. CPPs are a feature found predominantly, though not exclusively, on campuses where there is a highly rationalized logic around the economic benefits of academic science. Further, CPPs represent a commercialization of practice that is in tension with the student-development mission of traditional career counselors. Using an inhabited institutionalist approach, we show how the models differ and how staff on each side attempt to negotiate their competing roles in the multiversity environment. We also discuss some of the potential impact on students, on the career services profession, and on college-to-work pathways.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the career preferences of real estate students and the predisposing factors influencing the choice of career. The study also analysed the gender and socioeconomic variations with respect to the career preferences and factors influencing the career choice of real estate students in an emergent market like Nigeria.

Closed-ended questionnaires were administered on final year real estate students in the three Federal universities offering real estate in Southwestern Nigeria. Data were analysed using frequency counts, percentages, mean ranking, independent t-test, analysis of variance and correlation analysis.

The findings showed that the predominant individual factors influencing career choice of real estate students were personal career interest, the magnitude of initial salary, future financial prospects and job security. Furthermore, while intrinsic and economic/financial factors were the major themes influencing respondents’ career choice, the influence of a third party was less a likely determinant. Analysis of gender differences showed that there was a statistical difference between the male and female respondents with respect to the intrinsic and career exposure factors.

The study has implications for real estate students, career advisers/academic counsellors, organisations employing the services of real estate graduates, and educational institutions and policy stakeholders in the real estate sector. The study also has implication for real estate professional bodies in Nigeria and other emergent markets.

This is perhaps the first attempt that examined the factors influencing the career choice of real estate students in an emergent market like Nigeria, especially from the perspectives of gender and socioeconomic variations.

How might deeply embodied student experiences and nonhuman agency change the way we think about learning theory? Pushing the conceptual boundaries of practice-based learning and communities of practice, this chapter draws on student experiential fieldwork ‘on Country’ with Indigenous people in the Northern Territory (NT), Australia, to explore the peculiar silence when it comes to more-than-human ¹ features of situated learning models. As students engage with, and learn from, Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, they become open to the ways their learning is co-produced in and with place. The chapter builds a case for an inclusive conceptualisation of communities of practice, one that takes seriously the material performativity of nonhuman actors – rock art, animals, plants and emotions in the ‘situatedness’ of socio-cultural contexts. As a co-participant in the students’ community of practice, the more-than-human forms part of the process of identity formation and actively helps students learn. To shed light on the student experiences we employ Leximancer, a software tool that provides visual representations of the qualitative data drawn from focus groups with students and field diaries.

Although there is great potential for diversity, library and information science (LIS) is a relatively homogenous profession. Increasing the presence of librarians of color may help to improve diversity within LIS. However, recruiting ethnic minorities into LIS has proven to be difficult despite various initiative including scholarships, fellowships, and locally focused programs. The central questions explored in this research can be divided into two parts: (1) Why do ethnic minorities choose librarianship as a profession? (2) What would motivate members of minority groups to join a profession in which they cannot see themselves?

The research was conducted through semi-structured, qualitative interviews of 32 ethnic minority students from one of four ethnic minority groups (African American, Asian American, Hispanic/Latino, and Native American) currently enrolled in an LIS graduate program. Eleven themes emerged from the data: libraries, librarians, library work experience, LIS graduate program, career plans and goals, education and family, support, mentors, ethnicity and community, acculturation, and views of diversity.

The findings seem to support many assumptions regarding expectations and career goals. The findings related to libraries, librarians, mentors, and support illustrate that many recruitment initiatives are starting in the right place. However, the most noteworthy findings were those that centered on identity, acculturation, and diversity because they dealt with issues that are not often considered or discussed by many in the profession outside of ethnic minority organizations.

The underrepresentation of women in engineering has important consequences for meeting the need for a larger, talented scientific and technological labor force. Increasing the proportion of women faculty in engineering will help increase the persistence probabilities of women undergraduate and graduate students in engineering, as well as contribute to the range and diversity of ideas toward innovations and solutions to the greatest engineering challenges. This study aims to examine the association among gender, family formation and post-PhD employment patterns of a cohort of engineering doctorates.

Using the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients data, 2001–2010, descriptive and multinomial logit regression analyses are conducted to illustrate the career trajectories of engineering PhDs over a ten-year period.

The career trajectories of engineering PhDs are nonlinear, and transitions between employment sectors commonly occur over the ten-year time period studied. Although women engineering PhDs with young dependents are less likely to be employed initially after PhD completion, they tend to enter the workforce in the academic sector as time progresses. Early post-PhD employment as a postdoctoral researcher or in the academic sector contributes to the pursuit of the professoriate downstream.

While previous studies tend to focus on the early career outcomes of science and engineering students, this study contributes to the literature by focusing on the long-term career outcomes of engineering doctorates. Research findings provide engineering PhD students and PhDs with more information regarding potential post-PhD career trajectories, highlighting the multitude of career options and transitions that occur over time. Research findings also provide higher education administrators and doctoral program stakeholders with foundational information toward designing and revitalizing professional development programs to help PhD students prepare for the workforce. The findings have the potential to be applied toward helping increase diversity by shaping policies and programs to encourage multiple alternative career pathways to the professoriate.

States it is widely recognised that, despite excellent higher education research and training expertise, the UK is generally weak in transferring this knowledge into marketable products (House of Lords, 1997). In particular, there is serious under‐utilisation of science and technology graduates by the increasingly important small and medium enterprise (SME) sector. The aim of this paper is to explore the potential for absorbing the “know‐how” of science and technology graduates into the SME sector. Special consideration will be given to the attitudes of these graduates towards SME employment, while business start‐ups as alternative career options are also explored. The data are derived from a survey of 250 Manchester‐based science and technology students. The paper concludes with relevant policy recommendations.

It is widely recognised that, despite excellent higher education research and training expertise, the UK is generally weak in transferring this knowledge into marketable products. In particular, there is serious under‐utilisation of science and technology graduates by the increasingly important small and medium enterprise (SME) sector. The aim of this paper is to explore the potential for absorbing the “know‐how” of science and technology graduates into the SME sector. Special consideration will be given to the attitudes of these graduates towards SME employment, while business start‐ups as alternative career options are also explored. The data are derived from a survey of 250 Manchester‐based science and technology students. The paper concludes with relevant policy recommendations.

Based on a theoretical framework grounded in the social-cognitive theory and its derivative the social-cognitive career theory, the main purpose of this paper is to examine the role of entrepreneurial exposure in moderating the relationship between self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intention in the presence of different levels of outcome expectations.

Using a sample of 643 secondary students from Colombia, the authors tested the validity and reliability of scales used to measure the main constructs of the socio-cognitive career theory and used the construct of entrepreneurial exposure to examine contingent hypotheses using a four-step linear regression analysis.

The study results suggest that although the main social-cognitive career variables (self-efficacy and outcome expectation) and entrepreneurial exposure directly influence the formation of entrepreneurial intention and thus support previous findings, the authors also discover a new configuration of (interacting) antecedents. While on the one hand, even a low level of entrepreneurial exposure leads to a significant increase in the entrepreneurial intention of secondary students with high outcome expectation and high self-efficacy; on the other hand, high entrepreneurial exposure leads to a decrease in entrepreneurial intention among students with high entrepreneurial expectation and high self-efficacy.

The main implication of the study findings is although entrepreneurial exposure is beneficial for fostering entrepreneurial intention among secondary students, a high level of entrepreneurial exposure can have a detrimental effect especially among those with high self-efficacy and outcome expectations.

The paper suggests implications and suggestions for educators to foster the development of entrepreneurial intentions among students.

This study provides empirical evidence on the formation of entrepreneurial intention in a new setting. In addition, it improves one’s understanding of the main tenets of social-cognitive career theory by taking into account an important environment factor that can have a contrasting impact on the formation on entrepreneurial intention among adolescents.