The purpose of the study is to examine how Industry 4.0, and the digital environment, have together created a new situation for companies and universities in terms of soft skills for employability. While companies aim to introduce a new structure, universities try to align with these changes by developing new educational methods, curricula, and…

Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) has been widely used in both industry and in schools over at least the last twenty years. The Industry Hothousing variant of CPS is an intensive, time-constrained workshop-based process to build mutual trust between customers and industry experts in order to synergically develop creative solutions. The main…

This special double issue of the International Journal of Training Research with the theme 'emerging labor markets of the future--reimagining skills development and training' contains 13 articles that provide a comprehensive overview of global and regional trends that impact on emerging jobs and labor markets of the future. With particular…

For higher education graduates to be effective in the workplace, they require strong technical skills and the capability to operate across diverse knowledge landscapes to solve real world problems. At an Australian university, an interdisciplinary, short-term study tour programme was utilised to enhance students' inexplicit employability skills…

Focusing on a section of the Teaching International Students (TIS) project this article captures student and mentor perspectives within a Project-Based Professional Experience (PBPE) in the context of a large research-intensive university in Sydney, Australia. Animations co-produced with students were part of a Work Integrated Learning (WIL)…

Soft skills are becoming increasingly important and will be critical for success in the Information Systems profession. Employers complain about a lack in soft skills among graduates from tertiary education institutions. No agreement exists about what these skills actually are, which are of importance, and how acquiring these soft skills should be…

The aim of this article is to encourage a greater emphasis on creativity across and between varied fields of endeavour. It has been written to underline the interdisciplinary significance of creativity and the role of creativity in truly enhancing achievement. There is a reinvigorated awareness of the need for "big thinking", a global…

Creativity can be described as the ability to generate new ideas and combine existing ideas in new ways to find novel solutions to problems. Creativity is enhanced by a free flow of knowledge and through social contact. On this basis, the authors argue that knowledge sharing is central to creativity in design and present preliminary evidence to…

Significant efforts have now been made to identify the generic competencies required to succeed across different workplace contexts. The aims of this paper were to: (i) outline factors that contributed to the increased demand for generic competencies seen over the last three decades; and (ii) review the early generic competency frameworks…

A cursory review of academic headlines would suggest that educational institutions can be perceived as formalized, regimented and systematic--intellectual factories that reward those staff and students who conform best to rigid systems which ensure the efficient processing of quantity. Is this the reality? Do prevailing economic and bureaucratic…

Design is not getting the attention it deserves in industrial arts, at a time when designed products are everywhere. Design is creative problem-solving to meet a specific need. Integrating design concepts into the industrial arts curriculum is not difficult; the author explains how to do it. (AJ)

This article considers the nature of creativity in industrial and business settings, describes the Manchester (England) Business School Creativity Unit, models creativity in systems terms, reviews action research of the 1970s, and identifies recent areas of research at Manchester including creativity blocks and the impact of creativity training in…

A study of 753 utilities company workers examined the relationship between a measure of worker self-directed learning readiness and their job level, sex, age, education, race, job performance rating, creativity and problem-solving ability needed in their jobs, and the degree of change inherent in their work. (Author/MSE)