Concerns over the supply of highly-skilled (HS) science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) workers are well established and have been a feature of policy discourse in the UK for more than 50 years. Since the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, these concerns have been exacerbated by uncertainty about the movement of labour…

Skills training in the informal economy, known as informal apprenticeship, caters to the skills needs of millions of young people in the Global South. While it predates the development of formal Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) systems, it was not until the 'discovery' of the informal economy in the 1970s that attention was…

In 2017, the authors began research for a book that would suggest training needs for the U.S. and Canadian workforce in the coming decades. Early in the research process they realized there was much more to understand in an evolving workplace than the call for reskilling workers. Workers would face many decisions influencing their careers while…

Researchers and practitioners are aware of the importance of the skills of the local workforce in attracting and developing businesses in a regional economy. There has been, however, relatively little applied research concerning the identification of labor skill gaps in rural areas. We seek to address this issue through a case study of the Upper…

This study explored the process followed by a small manufacturing company in a rural area to implement a planned training program to develop the technical skills of its engineering/production workers as the company expands its operation. A case study design was used. Data was collected over an eight-month period by the examination of documents,…

In many countries, the skilled labor market has lagged educational expansion. As a result of increased competition, younger cohorts of the highly educated face decreasing returns to education or overeducation. Surprisingly, decreasing occupational outcomes do not coincide empirically with the economic returns among those with tertiary education.…

Accelerated aging trend has become a serious issue in meeting workforce demand in many developing and developed countries. Various workplace interventions have been sought to address this issue. The purpose of this study is to examine the extent that there is a typology of older workers whose skill proficiency and skill utilization are influenced…

In this article, we bring to the foreground an understudied dimension of working children's lives in the Global South: their access to money and the consumption this facilitates. Drawing on life history interviews, we show that among the Gamo weavers of Ethiopia, the modern phenomenon of a monetised childhood is at least six decades old and an…

Many adults--particularly those with just a high school education--struggle to get and keep jobs that pay enough to support their families and permit upward mobility. At the same time, some employers report difficulty finding people with the right skills to meet their needs. Programs that target in-demand industries or sectors and heavily involve…

This dissertation studies the effects of China's higher education expansion reform on workers' labor market outcomes. In Chapter 1, I investigate how China's higher education expansion reform affects young workers' labor market outcomes. Using data from the 2005 China Population Survey, I estimate the effects of the reform using a diff-in-diff…

Despite excellent education and a rich working experience in their home countries, skilled expatriates struggle to find employment that matches their qualifications. This article goes beyond the dominant stress and emotions' perspective on underemployment and presents the challenges of skilled migrant labour through the lens of the Common In-group…

Context: The topic of this paper is how mass emigration of skilled workers affects national policies, and employers' willingness to invest in Vocational Education and Training (VET) in Poland. In the wake of EU enlargement in 2004, Poland became one of the biggest sending countries for skilled labour to Western European countries. These massive…

Conventional wisdom regards a college degree as necessary for a well-paying job and a good life. By focusing on average earnings, this conventional wisdom obscures the enormous variability in outcomes at each education level; in fact, the top half of high school graduates earn in the same range as the bottom half of college graduates. However the…

This is the eighth year that CUPA-HR has conducted the CUPA-HR Staff in Higher Education Survey, which collects data on primarily non-exempt staff. The survey collects the following data for all higher ed staff: salary, sex, race/ethnicity, age, and years in position. This marks a special year for data collection and reporting for all CUPA-HR…

This article studies the problem of the discrepancy between attained education and employment in Russia. Our research relies on the results of an international study of adult competencies (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, or PIAAC) that measured the reading literacy and numeracy of working-age people using…