Strength in Numbers: Encouraging Every Staff Member to Work to Capacity

Libraries play a critical role in enhancing the learning landscape of the schools they support. In order for any library to become a powerhouse and a community meeting place, all library team members need to align with the library's vision, own it and begin to add their own strengths and talents purposefully. This article explores practical strategies for developing a visionary team, including supportive leadership, daily stand-up meetings, weekly staff meetings, special-focus teams, rostering and the “five conversations” approach. These effective strategies can be implemented across a broad range of library workforce contexts in order to ensure the most effective workforce teams are built.     

Ongoing child welfare services: Understanding the relationship of worker and organizational characteristics to service provision

Ongoing child welfare services are put in place after completion of the initial maltreatment investigation when there is a perceived need to mitigate the risk of future harm. The knowledge of how clinical, worker, and organizational characteristics interact with this decision to provide ongoing child welfare services is not well integrated in the research literature. Using secondary data from the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect-2008, this study’s primary objective is to understand the relationship of clinical, worker, and organizational characteristics to the decision to transfer a case to ongoing child welfare services and their relative contribution to the transfer decision in Canada. Findings indicate that several clinical level variables are associated with families receiving ongoing services. Additionally, organizational factors, such as type of services offered by the organization and the number of employee support programs available to workers, significantly predicted the decision to transfer a case to ongoing services. While no worker factors, such as education, amount of training, experience, or caseload, were associated with ongoing service receipt, the intraclass correlation coefficient of the final three-level parsimonious model indicated substantial clustering at the worker level. Results indicate that Canadian child welfare workers make decisions differently based on factors not available in the current study and that what would be deemed as important worker characteristics do not necessarily predict this outcome. Findings and implications for future research are discussed.     

A changing child welfare workforce: What worker characteristics are valued in child welfare?

A child welfare system is responsible for making difficult decisions. Child welfare workers are charged with assessing and determining when a child is in need of protection, including when it is necessary to intervene on behalf of children when their caregivers’ abilities and/or situation is deemed to put them at risk of abuse or neglect. Although the child welfare workforce in Ontario attended to an estimated 125,281 child maltreatment investigations in 2013, little is known about the skills, education, and experiences of these investigating workers. Notwithstanding assumptions about the qualifications and characteristics necessary for effective child welfare practice, few studies explicitly link the specific characteristics of workers to children, youth, and families achieving positive case outcomes. These assumptions have been shaped by a multitude of factors including knowledge of human resources, professional standards, and educational requriements. This study examined data from five cycles over twenty years of Ontario Incidence Studies (-1993, -1998, -2003, -2008, -2013) to provide a profile of child welfare workers. This is the first study to examine the changing profile of child welfare workers in any province in Canada and provides a foundation for developing effective recruitment and professional development strategies, and promoting a positive work environment. Policy and practice implications for the changing needs of these families are discussed.     

就业率统计偏差的原因探讨

就业率的计算依赖于两个重要指标,一是劳动力资源总量,二是就业人口数。以人口普查资料为基准计算劳动力资源总量比较准确,而由城镇单位劳动统计、工商行政管理对私营企业和个体工商户的行政登记,以及多村就业人员统计三者组成的“三合一”劳动统计得到的就业人口数不准确,存在很多问题,造成就业率统计偏差。     

Negotiating the Model Minority Image: Performative Aspects of College-Educated Asian American Professional Men

This study is a chapter in a larger work, in which the authors explore how eight college-educated Asian American professional men negotiate the model minority image to present the performative constructions of their multiple identities within the racialized and gendered context of U.S. organizations where they work. The authors first discuss the participants' perceptions of how others view their social identities as part of a homogenized concept, regardless of their diverse Asian American subjectivities. Then, they examine how the participants engage in performative aspects of the model minority image to promote positive impressions on others and to empower themselves in U.S. organizations. Exploring the subjective standpoint of being the model minority in the context of mainstream organizations, the authors aim to further reconsider the concept of identity as relational in the context of intercultural interactions.     

Rescaling Vocational Education: Workforce Development in a Metropolitan Region

This article profiles a vocational charter school located in Atlanta as an institutional model for customized industry training in the high-tech production firms located nearby. Social partnerships with business and industry, parents and educators, and elected officials will be illuminated, exhibiting new forms of neoliberalism that reconstitute the rules for governmental regulation and creation of educational projects. Workforce development policies in metropolitan regions accommodate transnational firms seeking human capital skills and expertise, with ready access to technological infrastructures for networks of telecommunications and transportation, supply and production, innovation and design, research and training. New learning spaces attract global capital in the stiff competition among cities for business relocations.     

IRSS Psychology Theory: Telling Experiences Among Underrepresented IS Doctorates

With the changing demographics of the American workforce, the National Science Foundation, along with the U.S. Department of Commerce, has highlighted the shortage of minorities in information technology (IT) careers ( http://www.ta.doc.gov/Reports/itsw/itsw.pdf ). Using data from a 6‐year period and the psychology Involvement‐Regimen‐Self Management‐Social (IRSS) network theory as defined by Boice (1992) , we discuss lessons learned from mentoring a group of Information Systems doctoral students who are members of a pipeline that can potentially increase the number of underrepresented faculty in business schools and who made conscious decisions to renounce the IT corporate domain. While our lessons speak to the need for more diversity awareness, we conclude that effective mentoring for underrepresented groups can and should include faculty of color (though limited in numbers) as well as majority faculty who are receptive to the needs and cultural differences of these student groups. Lastly, we draw on the work of Ethnic America to provide additional insight into our findings that are not offered by IRSS network theory.     

解决转型升级的“技工荒”困境:外资代工企业在华劳动力升级创新战略比较研究

运用全球价值链分析框架,跨人资与战略学科视角,对广东4家大型外资代工企业进行多案例研究,比较分析在华OEM业者,如何制定劳动力升级创新战略,解决价值链转型升级面临的"技工荒"困境。研究表明,新加坡资与台资OEM业者在转型升级路径,劳动力技能升级培训,激励考核制度创新,企业文化创新等战略选择上有相当差异。结果显示,要根治技工荒必须有效整合政产学研金等资源,为OEM产业前景提供丰富理论实践意义。     

Making a case for speech analytics to improve customer service quality: Vision,implementation, and evaluation

Firms operating in highly competitive markets must find ways to deliver customer value beyond offering competitive prices. Providing superior customer service in such environments becomes a strategic initiative because it can create a competitive advantage by fostering customer loyalty, which can also help ease pressure on profit margins and secure continued revenue flow. In this case study we report a case of utilizing speech analytics to improve customer service quality at a call center of a pharmaceutical supply chain service provider in the U.S. We first describe the strategic rationale behind enhancing customer service quality, followed by the implementation of a quality management program using a novel approach of speech analytics. We then present a longitudinal study that evaluated customer service performance using the data gathered from a team of 120 customer service agents during an 8-month period. Two categories of key performance indicators were established and measured, namely “workforce management” metrics and “customer experience” metrics, which served as the primary indicators in the analysis of the level of success in attaining three strategically identified performance goals to improve customer service quality.     

Work, skills development for employability and education for sustainable development

This article focuses on the radical changes taking place in skills development for work and life, and their implications for the content of education and schooling. It examines skills development for employability and workforce education, with particular reference to technical and vocational education and training (TVET). In turn, it is argued that the impact of these issues upon the world of work will be reflected in those education reform initiatives that will become necessary to keep pace with such institutionalized change. This was a keynote presentation by Rupert Maclean at the APERA Conference and draws heavily on the chapter by Victor Ordonez and Rupert Maclean ‘Seeking a New Education Paradigm for Teaching and Learning to Meet the Changing Needs of Education for All and skills Development for Work and Life‘ in the book ‘Learning and Teaching for the Twenty-first Century: Festschrift for Professor Phillip Hughes’, Rupert Maclean (Editor), Springer Academic Publishers (forthcoming). The authors thank UNESCO-UNVOC consultant Professor David Wilson for his valuable inputs to this paper and to the keynote presentation.