The Accreditation Board for Engineering Technology (ABET) requires that safety and health be integrated into an engineering curriculum in order to be accredited. These criteria for safety and health requirements, however, are not clearly defined. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has initiated Project SHAPE (Safety and Health Awareness for Preventative Engineering) instructional topics and curriculum development for engineering programs for the greater than 300 ABET accredited engineering schools. The present study was designed to evaluate how important safety and health (addressed as Environmental Safety and Health) knowledge/education are to an employer when seeking graduating Bachelor of Science Engineering students at Oregon State University (OSU). The study also seeks to find out what magnitude of ES&H instruction/knowledge is desired by prospective employers. And finally, the type or level of knowledge/education employers are seeking in their prospective OSU engineering employee. A questionnaire was developed and targeted at companies who recruited graduating Bachelor of Science Engineering students at OSU for employment during the 1993/1994 and 1994/1995 academic years. A roster of recruiters and the companies they represented generated a population of 110 recruiters from records kept in the Oregon State University Career Placement Office. Each recruiter was requested to complete a four page questionnaire. Participants were requested to rank qualifications for employment when seeking prospective engineering employees; how important ES&H were when considering a candidate; what kind and level of ES&H knowledge/education was preferred; and if a graduating B.S. Engineering student with ES&H knowledge/education was more likely to gain employment with their firm. A total of 72 surveys were returned, for an overall response rate of 65.5%. The results indicated that recruiters seeking graduating B.S. engineering students at OSU found ES&H knowledge/education 'Not Too' or 'Not At All' important when considering them for employment. However, the majority of those recruiters that indicated ES&H was an important qualification when considering an engineering candidate for employment, indicated the source of ES&H knowledge/education was through integration into the engineering curriculum. / Graduation date: 1998

The demands of a rapidly changing future on learners of Higher Education Institutions who need to be effectively employed, necessitate that these institutions become responsive to the demands and challenges of the future world of work. Employers keep on emphasising that first entry employees not only lack basic skills when entering the world of work, but that they also have difficulty in coping with the accelerated nature of the changing future. In order to address this dilemma, this research firstly focussed on the current state of Academic Development programmes at universities and technikons in South Africa, because these programmes claim to address problems which learners and the institutions might have, such as the support of teaching policies and procedures, quality assurance and advisory services. The documenting of the current state of academic development (AD) revealed that AD of learners focusses on issues such as access, redress, academic performance and throughput. These endeavours constitute a model where remedial, supportive work is done in fragmented fashion, to enable learners to attain the necessary skills to cope with the demands of higher education. It was further indicated that by adopting this aim for AD, higher education is not proactively responsive to the needs of the future world of work, but rather reactive to the immediate needs of learners and institutions alike. They focus on better results in stead of lifetime employability. A causal action research phase followed to identify what the demands of the future are for man, and to assess the current state of academic development of learners against these demands. The conclusion is that these demands constitute a total paradigm shift and that higher education is not responsive to these challenges. In order for learners to pursue lifetime employability, a totally new, reengineering AD-model should therefore be constructed. It is concluded that only through maximising human potential, which can be attained through facilitating lifelong learning, will leamers be able to meet the challenging demands of the future world of work. This reengineering AD-model contains the guiding idea or purpose and vision of the model namely that it should maximise human potential. It contains the theory, methods and tools, represented in the development of intra-, inter- and supra-personal relationships through facilitating metal earning and cooperative learning, and it contains innovations for the infrastructure to encompass whole institutions. Recommendations for future research fall in two categories, namely the future as source of research, and future research still to be undertaken. In terms of the future as source of research, ongoing research is needed by researchers all over the world to determine what the future holds in store. Regarding the proposed AD-model, future research still needs to be undertaken with regard to the implementation and ongoing reengineering of the model. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Curriculum Studies / Unrestricted

My dissertation intends to better understand the impacts of large-scale education expansion programs on students’ education and labor market outcomes both by reviewing related theory and prior literature, and by empirically analyzing a radical and large-scale higher education expansion program initiated in 1999 in China. In Chapter 1, I review theories, methods and empirical studies on the labor market consequences of education expansion from both the partial equilibrium treatment effect and general equilibrium structural model literature. This chapter serves as the theoretical and methodological foundation for my later analyses in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, and provides motivation for my empirical work because prior literature has not reached a consensus in terms of the impacts of large-scale education expansion programs on individuals’ labor market outcomes or the wage structure in the labor market. In Chapter 2, I take advantage of the fact that the substantially expanded access to higher education after China’s higher education expansion provides exogenous variation in the probability of college attendance for students of different cohorts and coming from different provinces. I thus employ a two-way fixed-effect model to estimate the expansion’s causal impacts on individuals’ education and labor market outcomes, and find that the expansion substantially improved educational outcomes, such as years of schooling completed, the probabilities of attending college and obtaining any post-secondary degree. The expansion also increased treated individuals’ probability of working and earning positive income, and modestly improved their hourly income. However, the expansion’s earnings effects are less robust to the exclusion of two largest metropolitan cities in China and the inclusion of province-year-level time-varying covariates to control for potential cofounding influences. In Chapter 3, I exploit multiple repeated cross-sections of data to explore how the expansion affects the labor market at large, especially the college-high school earnings gap. Incorporating an aggregate labor supply model with imperfect substitution across labor with the same education level but in different age groups, I decompose the changes in age-group specific college premium over time into changes in the aggregate and cohort-specific relative supply of college-educated (vs. high school-educated) labor, and in the aggregate relative demand for college-educated labor. My findings show that a 1 percent increase in the relative supply of BA-educated workers within one’s own cohorts would depress the BA-HS wage gap by 0.04 percentage point. Given that college enrollment increased by nearly 4 times from 1998 to 2005, the negative cohort effects could be substantial: for example, the cohort-specific relative supply for the youngest age group in my analysis increased by 112 percent from 2002 to 2009, suggesting an additional 4.5 percentage points decrease in the BA-HS wage gap for workers of this particular age group, on top of the effects of changes in aggregate relative supply and demand that are borne by workers in all age groups. Moreover, my estimates reveal a steadily increasing relative demand for BA-educated labor that raises college premium by approximately 2-3 percentage points annually; it is mitigated by the negative effects from the increase in the aggregate relative supply of BA-educated labor though; the latter effect also implies that the expansion has negative spillover effects on workers who attended college before the expansion. Putting together, my dissertation provides a holistic picture of the full impacts of one of the largest education expansion program on record. My work is among the first to systematically analyze how the expansion affects “treated” individuals and the labor market at large, and therefore could contribute to all levels of decision-making. Findings from my analyses could also have global implications for much broader issues such as education-related income inequality, and the general equilibrium and distributional effects of large-scale social programs.

Text in English / In its proposal of a communication strategy that will be of use as an enabling tool for increasing graduate employment potential, this study contributes uniquely to the discipline of communication. It envisages that communication takes into consideration the involvement of the key stakeholders, namely: government, labour market, education system, and media. Amid unemployment challenges that affect the majority of the population, media is regarded as a powerful tool to reach the majority of the population. With specific regard to graduate unemployment, media-driven interaction with unemployed graduates is not as efficient as it should be. Factors contributing to graduate unemployment are identified as career choices, skills shortage, job opportunities, career development, work experience, skills development, entrepreneurial skills, internships, and access to the labour market. It is also important to note that media is regarded as tool for disseminating information about such factors. In order to address this problem, the study establishes an integrated communication strategy that will be of use as an enabling tool for increasing the potential of graduate employment. The role of such communication could be applicable in various ways, such as organisational communication, business communication, public communication, personal communication, interpersonal communication, etc. This study locates itself in the domain of public communication because information about unemployment issues is a matter of public concern. This study adopts mixed research methodologies, with a survey research design—in order to gather data from the graduate students at a University of Technology. The study found that while social and print media are highly preferred and used due to their accessibility, there is a need to stress their use with regard to employment search. The main concepts that contributed to the establishment of the strategy included strategic communication, unemployment and media. It must be here noted that, for purposes of this study, strategic communication was informed by a confluence of the constitutive model of communication, systems theory, and situational theory of publics. The phenomenon of unemployment is informed by unemployment approaches, on the one hand, and the Maslow theory of needs, on the other. Furthermore, the understanding of the concept of media is informed by mass communication approaches and media richness theory. This thesis expects that, as an outcome, such a communication strategy would increase graduate employment potential. Public relations planning model is applied in the study in order to guide the implementation of the proposed communication strategy. / Communication Science / D. Litt. et Phil. (Communication Science)

鄭均杰. / "2013年8月". / "2013 nian 8 yue". / Thesis (Ed.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-123). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in Chinese and English. / Zheng Junjie.

My dissertation focuses on the heterogeneity in labor markets. The first chapter proposes an explanation for the unemployment rate difference between skill groups. Low skill workers (workers without a four year college degree) have a higher unemployment rate. The reason for that "... is mainly because they (low skill workers) are more likely to become unemployed, not because they remain unemployed longer, once unemployed" (Layard, Nickell, Jackman, 1991, p. 44). This chapter proposes an explanation for the difference in job separation probabilities between these skill groups: high skill workers have lower job separation probabilities as they are selected more effectively during the hiring process. I use a labor search model with match specific quality to quantify the explanatory power of this hypothesis on differences in job separation probabilities and unemployment rates across skill groups. The second chapter analyzes the effects of one channel of interaction (job competition) between skill groups on their labor market outcomes. Do skilled workers prefer unskilled jobs to being unemployed? If so, skilled workers compete with unskilled workers for those jobs. Job competition generates interaction between the labor market outcomes of these groups. I use a heterogeneous agents model with skilled and unskilled workers in which the only interaction across groups is the job competition. Direct effects of job competition are reducing skilled unemployment rate (since they have a bigger market) and increasing the unskilled unemployment rate (since they face greater competition). However number of vacancies respond to job competition in equilibrium. For instance, unskilled firms have incentives to open more vacancies since filling a vacancy is easier if there is job competition. Thus how unskilled unemployment and wages are affected by job competition depends on which effect dominates. The results for reasonable parameter values show that job competition does reduce the average unemployment rate. It reduces the skilled unemployment rate more, generating an increase in unemployment rate inequality. However, the employment rate at skilled jobs is unaffected. The third chapter focuses on skill biased technological change. Skill biased technological change is one of the explanations for the asymmetry between labor market outcomes of skill groups over the last few decades. However, during this time period there were also skill neutral shocks that could contribute to these outcomes. The third chapter analyzes the effects of skill biased and neutral shocks on overall labor market variables. I use a model in which skilled and unskilled outputs are intermediate goods, and final good sector receives all the shocks. A numerical exercise shows that both skilled and unskilled unemployment rates respond to shocks in the same direction. The response of unemployment rate to skill neutral shocks is bigger than the response to skill biased shocks for both skill groups. However, the unskilled unemployment changes more than the skilled unemployment rate as a response to skill neutral shocks. Thus, skill neutral shocks reduce the unemployment rate gap between skill groups. / text

In South Africa, reform policies and frameworks introduced since the 1994 democratic election have sought to bring about change to a highly ineffective and unfair system. In spite of all the changes which have occurred, however, there is evidence to suggest that the system is still not functioning as effectively as it might, given that a relatively large number of graduates remain unemployed in a country with a high skills shortage. This thesis aims to explore the experiences of graduates from one university, Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, as they enter the job market. It does this through the administration of a first job destination survey administered at the 2009 Graduation Ceremonies held in Grahamstown. Analysis of the survey takes into account the idea that it is not a degree per se, or even a degree from a prestigious university which brings employment, but also the social, cultural and human capital that graduates can bring to their job search.

Considering that Mpumalanga province has a large petrochemical plant owned by a multinational company that runs and owns mines, the province should abound with employment opportunities for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) college graduates, especially those from the local Gert Sibande TVET College. However, students with TVET college qualifications struggle to attract employment. Therefore, this study explored the question, “What can TVET providers in Mpumalanga do to enhance students’ employability?” The research was conducted in a selected TVET college in the province. The study employed a qualitative approach and an interpretive paradigm. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews, focus groups and document analysis. The identities of all respondents were protected. Upon analysis of the results, several measures that the TVET college, stakeholders and employers could employ, emerged. There was a lack of proper skills for graduates, qualifications without relevance and employers hardly acknowledging the TVET college qualifications. Some of the recommendations made include collaboration, relationship building between stakeholders and revision of the National Certificate (Vocational) [NC-(V)] curriculum. Topics for future research are also suggested. / Educational Management and Leadership / M. Ed. (Education Management)