The purpose of this study is to describe, analyse and evaluate the problem of shortage of well-qualified and trained personnel in the Libyan Oil Industry and to examine training policies, practices and programmes currently provided by this highly valued industry. The major goal of this study was to identify the necessary steps to be taken in order to improve the training and development programmes in this industry. A review is presented of literature on the nature and importance of training; how training can be conducted effectively; what kind of techniques should be followed to set up proper systematic training programmes; and criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of training and development programmes. The policies and practices of training currently in use in the Libyan Oil Industry are investigated, as are the current general education and training system in Libya and the role of Libyan universities and other higher education institutions. A questionnaire was applied to a sample of 101 trainees sent by the Libyan Oil Industry on training to the U.K. respondents represented different companies and projects and various fields of specialisation. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the raw data obtained from the questionnaire responses. The results of the study indicated the following: 1. A master plan for organising and supervising training programmes is needed. 2. Training programmes should be designed after identifying training needs. 3. Training should be in job related. 4. Trainees should work in the area in which they received training. 5. Top management should receive training in their major activities and responsibilities. 6. Training should be provided for all employees. 7. Training programmes should be evaluated regularly. 8. Co-ordination and collaboration should be made between industry and the university in regard to manpower training and development. 9. Training policies should be periodically reviewed. 10. Training should be considered as a continuous process.

No description available.

Master's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

The issue of gender wage differentials has long been of interest not only to economists, but also to governments and policy makers. In the last few decades, the labour market outcomes for females seem to be improving; however, the gender pay gap persists globally and females still earn significantly less than males. However, labour market discrimination has not received the research attention it deserves in developing countries in general, and in Syria in particular. A wide variety of factors could influence the gender pay gap, such as human capital, job characteristics and social factors. In the Syrian context, social and cultural factors play an important role in determining the position of females in the labour market. However, most previous studies have ignored the effects of social factors on other variables. Therefore, this research investigates the indirect effect of social factors on wages through human capital and job characteristics. This thesis has two main aims: to examine the main determinants of earnings for men and women in Syria, and to investigate the existence and extent of discrimination in the observed gender wage differentials there. To achieve this, two methods were used. Firstly, the Mincerian wage equations were used to analyse gender wage determinants, then discrimination was estimated using Oaxaca’s decomposition. Secondly, General Linear Modelling (GLM) Univariate ANOVA was tested to reveal the main and interaction effects of the factors specified in the theoretical model. The data used in this research came from the Syrian Labour Force Survey (LFS) 2010 conducted by the Government through the Central Bureau of Statistics. The results indicated that human capital variables were vital in explaining individuals’ earnings. Also, job characteristics and social variables explained wages to different degrees. Rates of return to education were, on average, around 5%, with women’s returns being better for higher educational levels. All three groups of variables explained only 17.19% of the earning gap between men and women, leaving 82.81% that could be considered as labour market discrimination. The GLM models revealed that social factors have significant indirect effects on wages as, when adding these indirect effects to the model, the explained variance in wages increased from 35% to 55%. This research makes significant contributions to the field of gender wage differentials and discrimination in Syria. The results of this study could help the Syrian government to develop tailored policies for the Syrian labour market to narrow the gender pay gap as decreasing gender inequality would enhance productivity and foster economic growth.

Human capital accumulation and its effect on labour market outcomes have been in the focus of economic research for decades. Traditionally the economic literature suggests that there might exist several forms of human capital, where human capital represents the knowledge, skills and health embodied in individuals. Skills and knowledge are largely acquired through education and experience but may also reflect, in part, innate abilities. In addition, some aspects of motivation and behaviour, as well as attributes such as the physical, emotional and mental health of individuals are also considered as human capital. These activities are referred to as human capital because people cannot be separated from their knowledge, skills and health, in the way they are separated from their physical and capital assets. Human capital accumulation is an important determinant of individuals' earning capacity and employment prospects, therefore plays an important role in determining the level and distribution of income in society. Moreover, the costs of these investments include direct outlays on market goods and the opportunity cost of the time that must be withdrawn from competing uses. Apart from direct investments in human capital people could also invest in constructing a network of relationships for example to find a job. Until now all these aspects have been studied separately, in this thesis I try to reconcile them.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-17T13:54:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 simara torres.pdf: 1034076 bytes, checksum: 8b7184997938c42b3960d4f1252250e9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-04-10 / This study renders problematic the Learning Program, (Law 10097/2000) developed by SENAC in São Luís-Ma in the period from 2002 to 2004, which has as a goal to prepare teenagers to enter the marketplace. The learning policy concerned to this age group in Brazil is retaking in its historical determinations with recent outline as from the 1990s as a consequence of the deep changes of the contemporary capitalism. Therefore, the analysis is out of way of the tendency that points out the precocious vocational training as something natural and common presented as an innovating solution to face questions that refer to social inequality. It deals with the constitution of institutions that historically played an important function in the teenagers learning system. The goal is to question the policies and ideological determination that gave them an important role. The methodology chosen was the search for the object apprehension in its objective and subjective conditions taking into account a quantitative and qualitative. With a descriptive and critical-analytical approach are presented the specific aspects that constitute the program with the purpose of setting up a possible relation between the learning and the program effects to the teenagers in order to compose a portrait of the learners. It is insignificant the teenagers employment, although important part expresses positive changes in view of knowledge and apprehended attitudes even though this knowledge does not set up favorable relations with the marketplace and with the work position. It is noticed contradictorily the functioning of the precocious vocational training in the scope of the minor apprentice s program developed by SENAC. / Este estudo problematiza o Programa de Aprendizagem (Lei 10097/2000) desenvolvido pelo SENAC de São Luís/MA, no período de 2003 a 2004, destinado à preparação do adolescente para sua inserção no mercado de trabalho. A política de aprendizagem voltada para este grupo etário no Brasil é retomada em suas determinações históricas, com recorte temporal recente, a partir dos anos de 1990, em razão das profundas transformações do capitalismo contemporâneo. Deste modo, a análise se posiciona na contramão da tendência que destaca a profissionalização precoce como algo natural e normal, apresentada como solução inovadora no enfrentamento de questões decorrentes da desigualdade social. Aborda a constituição das instituições que historicamente tiveram importante função no sistema de aprendizagem do adolescente, com o objetivo de pôr em questão as determinações políticas e ideológicas que fizeram com que a elas fosse atribuído preponderantemente esta função. Do ponto de vista metodológico, o caminho escolhido foi a busca pela apreensão do objeto em suas condições objetivas e subjetivas, tendo em conta dimensões quantitativas e qualitativas. Com uma abordagem descritiva e crítico-analítica estão expostos os aspectos específicos que constituem o Programa buscando estabelecer possível relação entre a aprendizagem e efeitos do programa para os adolescentes, de modo a constituir também um retrato dos próprios aprendizes. É inexpressiva a empregabilidade dos adolescentes, embora parte significativa manifeste alterações positivas do ponto de vista do conhecimento e atitudes apreendidas, ainda que este saber não estabeleça relações favoráveis com o mercado e com o posto de trabalho ocupado, verificando- se, então, contraditoriamente, a funcionalidade da profissionalização precoce no âmbito do Programa do Menor Aprendiz desenvolvido pelo SENAC.

The recent growth of Teach For America (TFA) has enabled it to substantially expand the teacher labour supply in many rural Southern communities, one of its largest and fastest-growing partnership subsets. Though it is generally accepted that these areas face more severe teacher shortages than most other regions in the country, there is little research as to how these staffing challenges arise or how they might be resolved; TFA’s potential to grow the rural Southern teacher supply thus signals a promising opportunity in need of further research. This work offers a case study of teacher labour outcomes in the Mississippi-Arkansas Delta, TFA’s oldest and largest rural Southern partnership site. In this region, local schools have experienced a 600 per-cent increase in corps member presence since 2008; consequently, TFA provided anywhere from a quarter to a half of the area’s new teacher labour supply each year from 2008 to 2010. A mixed-methods analysis illuminates both the causes of Delta teacher shortages and TFA’s potential to address these vacancies. Within the Delta, local schools face chronic teacher shortages because the communities they serve are overwhelmingly poor, geographically isolated, and racially segregated. TFA appears to have targeted the Delta communities where teacher labour policies have systematically fallen short, as it partners with districts bearing the greatest share of the region’s aggregate teacher vacancies. Additional statistical testing reveals that amongst these hard-to-staff districts, TFA has further focussed its resources into the schools that serve more rural, less educated, and/or predominantly African American populations. In this way, TFA funnels its corps members into the very districts where state reform efforts have struggled most, thus serving as a powerful resource for realigning ‘sticky’ outcomes in the most hard-to-staff Delta school districts. These findings notwithstanding, closer examination reveals significant drawbacks and limitations to current TFA outcomes in the rural Southern Delta. TFA does not saturate hard-to-staff school districts enough to produce statistically significant changes in local teacher vacancy rates. Instead, the programme appears to have established an unofficial threshold for the number of teachers placed per district; once this ceiling has been reached, additional corps members are funnelled into a new area regardless of the original district’s remaining need. Additionally, there is no long-term ‘exit strategy’ to help Delta districts employing TFA corps members to eventually cultivate their own high-quality teacher labour supply, thus leaving them perpetually dependent on TFA to staff their classrooms. Preliminary evidence suggests that state governments could address these shortcomings through 1) increased financial support for TFA to fully saturate vacancies in current partnership districts, as well as 2) the simultaneous development of grow-your-own teacher certification programmes in rural Delta districts. The evidence suggests that these two strategies would improve TFA as a targeted teacher recruitment strategy for hard-to-staff communities both in the Delta and across the programme’s nine other rural Southern partnership sites.

This dissertation investigates the emergence and impact of social movements in Chile since the reinstatement of democracy in 1990. Seeking to make an important contribution to the understanding of the reconstruction of collective action in post-transition Chile, I focus on two cases which have been particularly successful in questioning the benefits of market-friendly policies introduced by the military regime (1973-1989) and continued to a great extent by the Concertación governments (1990-2010). The first case is the 2006 Pingüino movement, named after the secondary school students’ penguin-like black and white school uniforms, which forced a substantial discussion on the education system’s segregating effects and its neoliberal underpinnings. The second case is the 2007 Contratista movement, composed of subcontracted workers of CODELCO – Chile’s main state-owned copper-extracting company. The Contratistas repoliticised a long-dormant debate on labour issues and revitalised a trade union movement which had been in decline in previous decades. I draw on the Contentious Politics approach, which stresses social movements’ interaction with the institutional terrain, and explain the emergence of the Pingüinos and Contratistas as the result of three distinct but intertwined processes: the opening up of the structure of political opportunities involved in the rise of President Bachelet; the deeply felt discontent with the education and labour reforms introduced by the military regime and kept largely intact by the Concertación governments; and the movements’ adoption of non-hierarchical organisational forms as a way of reconstructing collective action ‘from below’. In terms of political impact, I show that both the students and the contract workers were successful in introducing issues onto the public agenda that were not there before the emergence of the movements. The extent to which this was translated into bills that reflected the concerns of the movements, however, depended on their capacity to continue to exert pressure on the government and to forge political alliances. In this way, I argue that the impact of the movements was indirect and followed a two-stage process through which first the Pingüinos and Contratistas influenced aspects of their external environment, namely, public opinion and political alliances, and then the latter influenced policy. Overall, my research shows the links between processes at the micro-level (the development of organisational resources and grievance interpretation) and their subsequent impact at the macro-level (agenda-setting and policy impact) – a development that has undoubtedly acquired greater relevance and analytical urgency since the wide range of protests that have taken place around the world since 2011.