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The ElectroComms and EnergyUtilities Industry Skills Council (ISC), is the Industry Skills Council for the Electrotechnology, Communications, Electricity Generation, Transmission and Distribution, Rail Traction and Gas Supply Industries. On an annual basis, each of the eleven Industry Skills Councils, including EE-Oz Training Standards, develops an environmental scan, for the information and utilisation of the National Quality Council (NQC), Skills Australia and the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR). The intent of the report is to alert these three key bodies of 'potentially significant issues at a product, operational and systemic level'. This level of immediacy is the document's key characteristic and relies on real-time industry views and evidence captured from across Australia. The report includes: 1) latest intelligence; (2) identified workforce development needs; (3) current impact of training packages; and (4) future directions for endorsed components of training packages. Appendix A is a report on previous continuous improvement activity for all relevant training packages.

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This report has examined the structural barriers that contribute to differences in African American and white men's access to economic opportunities in Pittsburgh, specifically in employment and entrepreneurship. This action plan outlines recommendations for community leaders in Pittsburgh to help reduce or eliminate these barriers and enable African American men to improve their economic position.

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Australia has an ageing academic workforce and the nation’s capacity to refresh, build and maintain this workforce during a period of expansion in tertiary education participation needs urgent consideration. To inform possible strategies to recruit and retain academic staff, this study investigates the current attitudes of the academic profession in Australia towards academic work and academic careers. The research was conducted across 20 universities and a total of 5,525 responses were received from Australia’s academics, including sessional and casual staff.

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The author highlights the common belief that casual employment is a more ‘efficient’ or ‘productive’ way of engaging labour but that, in reality, significant ambiguities and paradoxes are associated with casual employment in Australia. These concern issues of definition, demographic characteristics of ‘casual’ workers and their wages, hours, training and entitlements to superannuation and long service leave. This paper analyses these paradoxes to reveal that casual employment can deliver short term gains for employers. This is because employers are able to use labour in ways that reduce the employers’ obligations to their employees. It is suggested that the key issue is hours of work and associated rights more so than reduced hourly wage rates. More comprehensive utilisation of labour associated with casualisation results in reduced unit labour costs (i.e. the labour cost per unit of output). This can be achieved without necessarily reducing nominal labour costs, such as hourly wage rates. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that these short term benefits undermine training and safety standards. That is, the better deployment of labour compromises its longer term development. The author provides suggestions on how deployment and development can be improved at the same time by reference to the practices of the better quality group training companies and multi-employer long service leave schemes. Show less

Enhancing the entrepreneurial spirit of young people is a means by which their employability and future potential as well as economic growth, the core goal of national policies, are incubated. Consequently, individuals performing entrepreneurial mindset are seen to possess the most future potential. We sketch the contours of this mindset and develop the idea of 'tuning' the entrepreneurial mindset with other discursive elements, or 'ingredients', available in society in order to make the overarching idea of entrepreneurialism more manageable, bearable, and even enjoyable at the individual level. The ingredients with which the mindset is tuned are non-depressiveness, happiness, and gratefulness. This tuning of the mindset is itself necessary and difficult mental work, even though it is invisible. Our analysis is based on 40 interviews with 18-30-year-old women and men from Tampere, Finland.

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In the UK and Scotland, considerable resources have been devoted to tackling the persistent issue of young people who are, or are at risk of becoming, not in education, employment or training (NEET), a pathologized status that incurs significant penalties for young people and the economy. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper analyses and evaluates policy rhetoric to explore how the NEET 'problem', agenda and population are constituted by the UK and Scottish governments. In doing so, numerous unifying and problematic NEET policy tropes are identified, challenging the popular notion of significant policy divergence between the punitive reputation of Westminster and the image of Scottish governance as more socially democratic. Moreover, this paper differs from traditional policy analysis by also evaluating policy from the perspective of young people, drawing on empirical data from a qualitative study of the school-to-work transitions of NEET and marginally employed young people in Scotland.

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This publication addresses the need for more equitable practices in the building industry and examines strategies for bringing these about through existing industry planning processes. The study looks at employment practices and attitudes to women’s participation. It includes a survey and interviews with employers in Victoria and a survey of building union officials in that State. The results provide insights into how and why discrimination occurs and how the industry can strategically address the problem. Show less

Workplace bullying has been acknowledged as an occupational health and safety issue in Australia and internationally. However, the phenomenon of bullying among construction industry apprentices, particularly in relation to work satisfaction, life satisfaction and self-rated health, is an under-examined area. Using a mixed-methods approach, two preliminary studies were therefore conducted to examine bullying among apprentices. Study one highlights the incidence of bullying and notes that approximately a third of apprentices had personal experiences of bullying. Study two extends this research by examining the relationship between bullying, life satisfaction, work satisfaction, study satisfaction and self-rated health. An [analysis of variance] ANOVA indicated that for those apprentices who had experienced bullying there was a significant relationship with decreased life satisfaction, decreased work satisfaction and poorer self-rated health. In addition, qualitative data in study two were explored using the Ungar et al (2008) model of resilience. This illustrated the potentially negative impact on young workers' resilience by highlighting the importance of contextual factors that amplify the experience of isolation, negative emotional consequences, and apprentices' decreased likelihood of reporting bullying for fear that bullying will continue.

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Skills training in fashion and textiles should lead to employability and job creation for its graduates. This is important for youth development and industrial growth as envisaged in Kenya's vision 2030. This paper reports on the different views collected from the employers in fashion and clothing industries who include: clothing factory managers, tailors, designers and trainers in Gatundu and Thika districts. A questionnaire was used to collect responses from 30 respondents selected through stratified random sampling. The questionnaire sought responses from the stakeholders on the competencies required for the youth polytechnic fashion and garment making trainees to fit appropriately into the job market. The data obtained were qualitative in nature and exposed gaps in occupational skills - interpersonal, empowerment and critical thinking. The findings of the study are likely to benefit curriculum developers for youth polytechnics (YPs) and vocational training centre (VCT) programs, the teachers, students and the fashion and textile industries who are the main employers.

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Telework offers many potential benefits for organisations including productivity improvements, employee retention, and other forms of competitive advantage. The primary aim of this study was to examine manager and employee perspectives on telework productivity and wellbeing. The study surveyed almost 100 [human resources] HR and team managers and over 1800 staff across 50 Australian and New Zealand organisations. Managers were interviewed on issues such as telework policy, processes, attitudes and outcomes, while organisational members were surveyed online on their telework experience, with a focus on support for telework, telework productivity, and wellbeing outcomes.

The study found strong evidence of the positive benefits of telework for both individual workers and their organisations. Some small negative effects were found for hybrid teleworking, notably higher perceived social isolation and strain/stress. Findings suggest some attention to the ergonomics aspects of the home office should be made by employers. Given the many potential benefits of telework identified in this study and in previous research, it was surprising that most participating organisations failed to engage in any form of cost benefit analysis relating to telework, or seek to measure the positive benefits of this mode of working.

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