Senior civil servants (SCS) are powerful actors with great responsibilities in the field of policymaking and management. Due to public sector reforms that are New Public Management oriented, specialised education and structured training programmes for (future) SCS as well as fast-track systems for high-potential employees have become increasingly…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a short-term time management intervention on procrastination. Procrastination is a serious issue for many students and associated with different negative consequences, such as anxiety or low grades. As procrastination is described as a self-regulatory failure, a training programme focussing…

This paper focuses on commonalities and differences of three approaches to large-scale professional development (PD) in mathematics education, based on two studies from Germany and one from the United States of America. All three initiatives break new ground in improving PD targeted at educating "multipliers", and in all three cases…

The personal experiences and values of individual teachers can tend to restrict the ability to promote a "global perspective" in the social studies, the subject area most suited to that concept. One antidote to this instructional myopia is the prospect of overseas travel, in the form of study tours, the type of which have been shown to…

In order to remain successful and competitive in business today it is important that SMEs can sustain themselves by adapting to economic changes. SMEs have a distinct advantage over large companies in that they have less bureaucracy and hierarchical restrictions and can implement changes quickly. However often they are slow to change their way of…

Whilst much has been written on the role and function of the elite schools in Hitler's vision for his "thousand-year Reich," this article focuses on an area within the history of the Ordensburgen that has not been examined -- that is, the content of training for particular groups given at these elite educational institutions during the…

Reconstructing the parallel structure of "dual" and "school-based" vocational routes reveals the close connection between the German vocational training system and the segmentation of the labour market by gender. The example of jobs in childcare and pre-primary education shows that the legacy of semi-professionalism in these…

Training in process control environments requires operators to be prepared for temporal and adaptive transfer of skill. Three training methods were compared with regard to their effectiveness in supporting transfer: Drill & Practice (D&P), Error Training (ET), and procedure-based and error heuristics training (PHT). Communication…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to re-examine the unique political economy of Germany's dual apprenticeship training model and its underlying philosophy of corporatist governance. It responds to recent arguments suggesting that Germany's collectivist skill regime is under threat, increasingly giving way to the introduction of…

Despite the heavy investments in the economic development of East German industry, the region still faces immanent structural challenges that affect the provision of vocational education and training (VET), in particular apprenticeships, and the availability of a well skilled workforce. In this article the situation of the economy as well as new…

Informal learning is becoming a standard format in companies' training and development (T&D) activities. It requires a specific learning competence comprising cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational dimensions. In the present study, it was investigated whether learning-competence variables predict success in informal learning. Given the…

The paper picks up "matching problems" related to current European education policy moves by referring to the German, the French and the Austrian VET system respectively. As we here refer to "dual systems" or "school-based systems" respectively, the pre-conditions for transforming European policy into national…

The apprenticeship training system in Germany, where training takes place in both private companies and vocational schools, has traditionally played an outstanding role in the development of young skilled workers. However, particularly since the start of the new millennium, the chances of smooth transition from secondary school to an…

Research in commercial organizations has provided a multitude of examples on how leadership development can effectively foster employees' performance and work-related attitudes such as commitment or satisfaction. In contrast, to date systematic leadership development is largely lacking for employees in higher education. However, we suggest that…

In search of methods that improve the efficiency of teaching and training in organizations, several authors point out that mass customization (MC) is a principle that covers individual needs of knowledge and skills and, at the same time limits the development costs of customized training to those of mass training. MC is proven and established in…