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Background and Aim: South Africa is currently experiencing serious challenges relating to youth and graduate unemployment. Some of the reasons cited for t his problem are the inability of Higher Education to produce graduates that meet employer needs. As a result there is a great need for higher education institutions (HEIs) to develop approaches to address the issue of graduate employability skills. The main aim of this study is to investigate the perceptions of desirable graduate workplace skills for commerce graduates. Method: A cross-sectional research design was followed with data collected by means of surveys. The survey drew responses regarding the topic from a broad cross-section of respondents at one point in time, making the approach practical and reasonable for pursuing the exploratory and descriptive aims of the study. A sample of 244 final year students, 94 postgraduates and 21 academics participated in this study. Results: The research findings indicated that graduate employability is significantly dependent on the soft and technical skills required in the workplace and that the university does provide some of the skills as part of its commerce programmes. The following specific results were obtained: • The results showed that in general all three groups of respondents perceived that the higher education institutions equipped them to a large extent with the soft skills needed in the workplace. The findings indicated that the skills which final year students perceive to be the most important are not as the same at the one rated most important by academics and postgraduates. • The findings reflected a significant gap between current soft skills training and the desirable soft skills • Based on the study findings, the three stakeholders mentioned one common technical skill (computer literacy) which they gained throughout their studies • Generally, results showed that undergraduates, postgraduates and academics perceive that students have gained some technical skills during their studies which will prepare them to a large extend for employability • The respondent's results from chapter 5 indicated that there is a great need for HEis to provide technical skills training relevant to one's career that will help graduates to be prepared for the workplace • Based on the study find ings from chapter 5, the results showed a high need for WIL programme to be part of the undergraduate student's curriculum Practice Relevance: Studies in the related field of graduate employability skills have been previously conducted by different researchers globally. Despite the previous studies, the topic "perceptions of desirable graduate workplace skills for commerce graduates" have not been researched before. The study attempts to identify if Higher Education Institutions provide graduates with the necessary soft and technical skills required to enhance their employability. This study contributes to the literature where the benefits of conducting it can be experienced by students, HEis, employers and the country in general through determining what skills are required for being employable. / Thesis (M. Com (HRM) North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, 2012

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The purpose of this investigation is to identify various economic, societal, and institutional variables that can be associated with enrollment trends of the Research Universities I and II. These variables will then be used to formulate disaggregated enrollment forecasts by enrollment-change categories and by institutional classification, using Carnegie Commission and Office of Education taxonomies. These disaggregated trends along with appropriate variables and forecasted variables will be used to construct prediction models by category and institution. The results indicate that the research universities have not experienced declining enrollments and that their growth was slower but more stable than the national norm. They have not experienced the growth of part-time students that occurred nationally. Instead, the increased enrollment was caused by a growth in the female student population. The enrollments of research universities can be predicted by the one variable of time with an error of less than 3.0 percent. The predictors based upon individual institutions produce an error of 0.993 percent for the Research Universities I and 1.650 percent for the Research Universities II. The predictions based upon trend groups produced an error of 4.32 percent and 2.29 percent for the respective research universities. The enrollment of the research universities can be predicted with an accuracy of 13.54 percent for the Research Universities I and 8.134 percent for group II.

A common task facing college freshman and sophomore music majors is the acquisition of recognition ability for a core repertoire of music literature. It seems plausible that interactive computer technology holds great promise for the development of this particular skill. To test this premise, students from an undergraduate music literature class of approximately 80 members were chosen to participate in a study. Students in the experimental group (n = 17) utilized a computerized listening station (employing researcher-designed instructional programming) to determine if such use would augment the ability of those Ss to identify selected works in a subsequent recognition task, while students in a control group utilized a typical repeated hearing strategy. A Likert-scale questionnaire administered prior to the study served as a pretest and assessed the students' knowledge of composers and works included in the study. No significant difference between the groups was found. At the conclusion of the study, a recognition test was administered which required students to identify composers, works, movements of works, and theme groups of the works included in the study. Ss in the experimental group had a significantly higher score (p < .001) on the posttest than the control group. The results of the study suggest that use of such a listening station improves the ability of undergraduate music majors to develop a recognition ability for basic music repertoire, and possibly decreases the amount of time needed for the process. Recommendations include: (1) expanding study sample sizes in subsequent studies, (2) widening the music example pool, (3) expanding the study to include more dependent variables in the analysis, and (4) including more detailed time analysis in subsequent studies.

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With new technologies arriving at an ever-increasing rate, legacy systems migration has become a growing research area. However there are few if any studies that analyze a comprehensive actual migration in progress. Legacy system migrations commonly fail and typically fail in the planning phase unbeknownst to their project managers. Possessing information on other successes and problems would aid in mitigating these failures.The Value and Significance of the ProblemThe purpose of this research is to initially document an actual legacy systems migration for a small liberal arts educational institution and analyze the successes and failures to identify their underlying cause in order to enforce or discourage certain practices. There are very few software/hardware migration studies, if any that are based on actual data. For this reason this study provides the academic community with an important data point for analysis.The MethodThe migration under consideration is an Administrative Systems Upgrade at DePauw University. The current system that has had minor upgrades is approximately twenty years old. The planned migration has a three-year scope. The planning phase started on March 2002 and finished on March 2003. Important documents that will be analyzed to form a basis for analysis will be a white paper entitled Employment of Technology to Improve Administrative Operations: Assessment and Recommendations, produced by an external consultant, the resulting actual migration plan, discussions with the project manager and related technical staff who are involved with the migration. RisksSince the research will conclude before the completion of the DePauw Administrative Systems Upgrade, this study will be limited to the tasks completed within the timeframe. As with studying any real system success of the study may be affected by:Completion of assigned milestones within the project itself;Input from end users in the form of interviews or surveys;Input from IT staff involved in the upgrade in the form of interviews or surveys.The portion of the DePauw Administrative Systems Upgrade that falls outside the scope of this research may be the topic of future research. / Department of Computer Science