The study is an investigation into the pathways of out-of-school youth and their re-entrance into the Education Training and Development (ETD) system or the labour market. In the study the pathways of youth who dropped out of school between grades 1 and 11 are traced as they seek re-entrance to the ETD system, or entrance into the labour market. Particular attention was given to the factors that determine the choices that dropouts make either in re-entering the ETD system or entering the labour market. An analysis of the experiences of the interviewed sample of dropouts is presented. The study employs a qualitative research methodology using interviews to elicit the experiences of dropouts and school managers. The participants (young people and three school principals) were selected through snowballing from a township south of Durban. Individual and focus group interviews were held. The findings provide evidence of the value of investing in education, as suggested by the youth. This is in line with the human capital theory framework that suggests that there are major benefits to investing in education. The study is concluded by suggesting the need for second chance education in South Africa. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Education Management and Policy Studies / unrestricted

No description available.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Every year, more than 200 schools of social work graduate thousands of Master of Social Work (MSW) students. These graduates enter the world of work and continue on their journey toward becoming professional social workers. Surprisingly, very little is known in social work about the transition from student to professional, especially for MSW graduates. Related literature in nursing and education is reviewed in order to have a foundational knowledge of the transition process for similar professionals. The research questions for this study were: (a) What is the process of transition from student to employee like for new MSW graduates? (b) What are the factors that influence this transition during the first 18 months for MSW graduates? and (c) Are there critical junctures in the processes of transitioning from being a student through the first 18 months of MSW employment that are related to satisfaction and/or professional growth? This dissertation used qualitative, constructivist grounded theory methodology in order to study this relatively unknown subject. The conceptual model that emerged in this study is called Riding the Waves, and illustrates the transition process for new graduates learning to become a professional social worker. There are five stages of this model: Testing the Waters, Jumping In, Sinking or Swimming, Treading Water, and Riding the Waves. In Testing the Waters, critical issues of finding a job, negotiating a salary and licensure are salient. In Jumping In, new graduates experience orientation, examine preparedness from school and encounter the real world of work as opposed to their expectations. In Sinking or Swimming, new graduates negotiate not knowing, supervision, dealing with emotions and difficult work situations. In Treading Water, new graduates explore finding a balance between self-care and compassion fatigue and articulate job and compassion satisfaction. In the last stage, Riding the Waves, new graduates are more stable, gain confidence, find their voice and discuss what is ahead for them. Implications for social work students, educators, and employers are discussed including better preparing students for the transition, improving orientation and supervision, and providing the support that these new professionals require and deserve.

Ce mémoire traite des expériences d’adaptation des travailleuses sociales nouvellement diplômées. Nous nous sommes intéressées à la manière dont les finissantes québécoises du baccalauréat en travail social ont vécu leur première année en emploi en tant que travailleuses sociales œuvrant pour le Réseau de la santé et des services sociaux du Québec et s’y sont adaptées. Nous abordons les défis qu’elles ont rencontrés, les éléments ayant facilité leur adaptation ainsi que les nombreuses stratégies d’adaptation qu’elles ont développées en début de carrière. Pour ce faire, ce mémoire a été réalisé dans une démarche qualitative et nous avons rencontré sept travailleuses sociales nouvellement diplômées dans le cadre d’entrevues semi-dirigées. La conceptualisation de l’adaptation professionnelle proposée par Pullen Sansfaçon, Brown et Graham (2012) nous a permis d’analyser le processus d’adaptation de ces nouvelles professionnelles et de mieux comprendre leurs expériences en début de carrière en ayant recours à l’interaction symbolique ainsi qu’aux concepts d’adaptation, d’acculturation et d’identité professionnelle. Par conséquent, l’adaptation de ces professionnelles est un processus qui repose sur les interactions entre leurs expériences antérieures; le choc en début de carrière; le contexte organisationnel dans lequel ce processus d’adaptation a lieu; la manière dont elles sont accueillies et le soutien qu’elles reçoivent; la manière dont elles s’approprient leur rôle, acquièrent de nouvelles connaissances, développent leurs compétences et leur identité professionnelle; ainsi que leur identité, leurs caractéristiques personnelles et la manière dont elles prennent soin d’elles-mêmes durant leur processus d’adaptation. / This thesis explores how Quebec Bachelor of Social Work graduates experienced and adapted to their first year on the job as newly qualified social workers working for the Quebec health and social services network. We discuss the challenges they faced, the factors that facilitated their adaptation, and the many coping strategies they developed at the start of their careers. Through a qualitative perspective, we conducted semi-structured interviews with seven newly qualified social workers. The conceptualization of professional adaptation proposed by Pullen Sansfaçon, Brown and Graham (2012) enabled us to analyze the adaptation process of these new professionals and to better understand their experiences at the beginning of their careers by using symbolic interactionism as well as the concepts of adaptation, acculturation and professional identity. Consequently, the adaptation of these newly qualified social workers is a process based on interactions between their previous experiences; the shock at the start of their career; the organizational context in which this adaptation process takes place; the way they are welcomed and the support they receive; the way they appropriate their role, acquire new knowledge, develop their skills and their professional identity; as well as their identity, their personal characteristics and the way they take care of themselves during their adaptation process.

Poor post-school outcomes for young adults with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have underscored the need to gain insight into the use of evidence-based practices (EBPs) in the planning and implementation of transition services. EBPs for effective transition planning and implementation have been documented in the literature but do not appear to be fully utilized in practice to achieve desired student outcomes, reflecting a research-to-practice gap. EBPs have the potential to produce positive outcomes at the high school level, if implemented with fidelity. Special education personnel, especially administrators, play a vital and unique role in transition planning. They can either facilitate or hinder the process. This phenomenological study investigated the perceptions of public school administrators regarding the extent of their awareness of EBPs to ensure the successful transition of students with ASD and associated barriers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 secondary-level public school administrators. Major themes identified through analyzing the qualitative data included (a) a positive vision for students with ASD, (b) characteristics of a good transition program, (c) administrators' roles in the transition process, (d) barriers to EBP implementation, (e) strategies to reduce barriers, and (f) ownership of what administrators can do to remedy the problem. Lastly, the study generated recommendations to assist school districts with improving transition services for students with ASD.

The primary purpose of this study was to determine how the current hospitality management curriculum at The International Hotel School contributes to students’ preparedness from their own perspectives. Generic and curriculum specific skills that can be used for curriculum evaluation were identified, a framework of curriculum variables to rate the level of student preparedness was developed, the effectiveness of the hospitality management curriculum from the perspectives of students’ perceptions of preparedness was analysed, and the aspects that contribute most to student preparedness were identified through a literature study and an empirical investigation. The findings were summarised and it was recommended that The International Hotel School needs to review the hotel and restaurant accounting course and the experiential learning components. Furthermore, lecturers of The International Hotel School should receive training on the implementation of more interactive course content delivery methods. / Educational Studies / M. Ed. (Adult Education)

In the shift to a globalised creative economy where innovation and creativity are increasingly prized, many studies have documented direct and indirect social and economic benefits of the arts. In addition, arts workers have been argued to possess capabilities which are of great benefit both within and outside the arts, including (in addition to creativity) problem solving abilities, emotional intelligence, and team working skills (ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, 2007). However, the labour force characteristics of professional artists in Australia and elsewhere belie their importance. The average earnings of workers in the arts sector are consistently less than other workers with similar educational backgrounds, and their rates of unemployment and underemployment are much higher (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2005; Caves, 2000; Throsby & Hollister, 2003). Graduating students in the arts appear to experience similar employment challenges and exhibit similar patterns of work to artists in general. Many eventually obtain work unrelated to the arts or go back to university to complete further tertiary study in fields unrelated to arts (Graduate Careers Council of Australia, 2005a). Recent developments in career development theory have involved discussion of the rise of boundaryless careers amongst knowledge workers. Boundaryless careers are characterised by non-linear career progression occurring outside the bounds of a single organisation or field (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996a, 1996b). The protean career is an extreme form of the boundaryless career, where the careerist also possesses strong internal career motivations and criteria for success (Baruch, 2004; Hall, 2004; Hall & Mirvis, 1996). It involves a psychological contract with one's self rather than an organisation or organisations. The boundaryless and protean career literature suggests competencies and dispositions for career self-management and career success, but to date there has been minimal empirical work investigating the predictive value of these competencies and dispositions to career success in the boundaryless or protean career. This program of research employed competencies and dispositions from boundaryless and protean career theory to predict career success in professional artists and tertiary arts graduates. These competencies and dispositions were placed into context using individual and contextual career development influences suggested by the Systems Theory Framework of career development (McMahon & Patton, 1995; Patton & McMahon, 1999, 2006a). Four substantive studies were conducted, using online surveys with professional artists and tertiary arts students / graduates, which were preceded by a pilot study for measure development. A largely quantitative approach to the program of research was preferred, in the interests of generalisability of findings. However, at the time of data collection, there were no quantitative measures available which addressed the constructs of interest. Brief scales of Career Management Competence based on the Australian Blueprint for Career Development (Haines, Scott, & Lincoln, 2003), Protean Career Success Orientation based on the underlying dispositions for career success suggested by protean career theory, and Career Development Influences based on the Systems Theory Framework of career development (McMahon & Patton, 1995; Patton & McMahon, 1999, 2006a) were constructed and validated via a process of pilot testing and exploratory factor analyses. This process was followed by confirmatory factor analyses with data collected from two samples: 310 professional artists, and 218 graduating arts students who participated at time 1 (i.e., at the point of undergraduate course completion in October, 2005). Confirmatory factor analyses via Structural Equation Modelling conducted in Study 1 revealed that the scales would benefit from some respecification, and so modifications were made to the measures to enhance their validity and reliability. The three scales modified and validated in Study 1 were then used in Studies 3 and 4 as potential predictors of career success for the two groups of artists under investigation, along with relevant sociodemographic variables. The aim of the Study 2 was to explore the construct of career success in the two groups of artists studied. Each participant responded to an open-ended question asking them to define career success. The responses for professional artists were content analysed using emergent coding with two coders. The codebook was later applied to the arts students' definitions. The majority of the themes could be grouped into four main categories: internal definitions; financial recognition definitions; contribution definitions; and non-financial recognition definitions. Only one third of the definition themes in the professional artists' and arts graduates' definitions of career success were categorised as relating to financial recognition. Responses within the financial recognition category also indicated that many of the artists aspired only to a regular subsistence level of arts income (although a small number of the arts graduates did aspire to fame and fortune). The second section of the study investigated the statistical relationships between the five different measures of career success for each career success definitional category and overall. The professional artists' and arts graduates' surveys contained several measures of career success, including total earnings over the previous 12 months, arts earnings over the previous 12 months, 1-6 self-rated total employability, 1-6 self-rated arts employability, and 1-6 self-rated self-defined career success. All of the measures were found to be statistically related to one another, but a very strong statistical relationship was identified between each employability measure and its corresponding earnings measure for both of the samples. Consequently, it was decided to include only the earnings measures (earnings from arts, and earnings overall) and the self-defined career success rating measure in the later studies. Study 3 used the career development constructs validated in Study 1, sociodemographic variables, and the career success measures explored in Study 2 via Classification and Regression Tree (CART - Breiman, Friedman, Olshen, & Stone, 1984) style decision trees with v-fold crossvalidation pruning using the 1 SE rule. CART decision trees are a nonparametric analysis technique which can be used as an alternative to OLS or hierarchical regression in the case of data which violates parametric statistical assumptions. The three optimal decision trees for total earnings, arts earnings and self defined career success ratings explained a large proportion of the variance in their respective target variables (R2 between 0.49 and 0.68). The Career building subscale of the Career Management Competence scale, pertaining to the ability to manage the external aspects of a career, was the most consistent predictor of all three career success measures (and was the strongest predictor for two of the three trees), indicating the importance of the artists' abilities to secure work and build the external aspects of a career. Other important predictors included the Self management subscale of the Career Management Competence scale, Protean Career Success Orientation, length of time working in the arts, and the positive role of interpersonal influences, skills and abilities, and interests and beliefs from the Career Development Influences scale. Slightly different patterns of predictors were found for the three different career success measures. Study 4 also involved the career development constructs validated in Study 1, sociodemographic variables, and the career success measures explored in Study 2 via CART style decision trees. This study used a prospective repeated measures design where the data for the attribute variables were gathered at the point of undergraduate course completion, and the target variables were measured one year later. Data from a total of 122 arts students were used, as 122 of the 218 students who responded to the survey at time 1 (October 2005) also responded at time 2 (October 2006). The resulting optimal decision trees had R2 values of between 0.33 and 0.46. The values were lower than those for the professional artists' decision trees, and the trees themselves were smaller, but the R2 values nonetheless indicated that the arts students' trees possessed satisfactory explanatory power. The arts graduates' Career building scores at time 1 were strongly predictive of all three career success measures at time 2, a similar finding to the professional artists' trees. A further similarity between the trees for the two samples was the strong statistical relationship between Career building, Self management, and Protean Career Success Orientation. However, the most important variable in the total earnings tree was arts discipline category. Technical / design arts graduates consistently earned more overall than arts graduates from other disciplines. Other key predictors in the arts graduates' trees were work experience in arts prior to course completion, positive interpersonal influences, and the positive influence of skills and abilities and interests and beliefs on career development. The research program findings represent significant contributions to existing knowledge about artists' career development and success, and also the transition from higher education to the world of work, with specific reference to arts and creative industries programs. It also has implications for theory relating to career success and protean / boundaryless careers.

The primary purpose of this study was to determine how the current hospitality management curriculum at The International Hotel School contributes to students’ preparedness from their own perspectives. Generic and curriculum specific skills that can be used for curriculum evaluation were identified, a framework of curriculum variables to rate the level of student preparedness was developed, the effectiveness of the hospitality management curriculum from the perspectives of students’ perceptions of preparedness was analysed, and the aspects that contribute most to student preparedness were identified through a literature study and an empirical investigation. The findings were summarised and it was recommended that The International Hotel School needs to review the hotel and restaurant accounting course and the experiential learning components. Furthermore, lecturers of The International Hotel School should receive training on the implementation of more interactive course content delivery methods. / Educational Studies / M. Ed. (Adult Education)

Die Wege von ehemaligen Förderschüler*innen nach der Schule in Ausbildung, Arbeit oder Übergangsmaßnahmen können mit Hilfe der bestehenden Statistiken nur vage nachvollzogen werden. Die subjektive Sichtweise der Förderschüler*innen wird dabei zudem sehr selten erfasst. Besonders bei dem Förderschwerpunkt (FS) Geistige Entwicklung (GE) sind (strukturelle) Benachteiligungen deutlich zu erkennen. So werden die Schüler*innen dieses Förderschwerpunktes fast ausschließlich an der Förderschule beschult. Das Forschungsdesign der Dissertation ist eine explorative Längsschnittstudie mit Fokus auf die Entstehung und Umsetzung des Berufswunsches bei acht Schüler*innen des FS GE. Innerhalb dieses Lebensabschnittes werden die Partizipationsmöglichkeiten und Barrieren aus Sicht der Schüler*innen eruiert. Als theoretisch-konzeptionelle Grundlage dient der Begriff der Partizipation. Der inflationär verwendete und dennoch unscharf definierte Partizipationsbegriff wird sowohl politisch in unterschiedlichen Diskursen, als auch im Bereich der Behindertenhilfe rege diskutiert. Besonders eine Abgrenzung zu dem Begriff der Teilhabe findet sich jedoch eher selten. In der Dissertation wird eine Schärfung des Begriffs Partizipation vorgenommen. Die Studie konnte zeigen, dass Partizipationsmöglichkeiten der Schüler*innen des FS GE in dem Übergang Schule-Beruf nur in einem geringen Umfang und in einem begrenzten Handlungsrahmen möglich sind. Das Lehrpersonal, die Reha-Berater*innen der Agentur für Arbeit, sowie die Eltern haben einen großen Einfluss auf den Berufswunsch der Förderschüler*innen und die Umsetzung dessen. Alternative Ausbildungs- und Beschäftigungsmöglichkeiten, wie z.B. Unterstützte Beschäftigung, Fachpraktikerausbildung usw. wurden von den Schüler*innen nicht thematisiert. Des Weiteren konnten die teilweise engen Kooperationen der Schulen zu den Werkstätten für behinderte Menschen aufgezeigt werden, sowie eine fehlende langfristige Begleitung von unabhängigen Berufsberater*innen. / The paths of former special needs students after school into training, work or vocational education can only be very vaguely traced with the help of the existing statistics. The subjective point of view of the special needs students is only rarely recorded. Structural disadvantages are particularly evident at students with special needs related to intellectual development. Students with special needs related to intellectual development are almost exclusively taught at special schools. The research design of the dissertation is an exploratory longitudinal study. The research question was how the career aspirations were developed, of eight special needs students related to intellectual development, and how they can implement them. In the dissertation, the concept of participation was chosen as the theoretical and conceptual basis. The concept of participation, which is used excessively and is still vaguely defined, is the subject of lively debate both politically in various discourses and in the work with people with disabilities. However, a distinction from the concept of participation is rare. In the dissertation, an urgently needed differentiation of the definition of the concept of participation took place. The study was able to show that the participation opportunities for students in the transition from school to work are only possible to a small extent and within a limited, usually predeter-mined, framework for action. In the case of the special needs students, it can be seen that the teaching staff, the rehabilitation consultants from the employment agency and the parents have a major influence on the career choice of the special needs students. Existing support options, such as supported employment, etc. were not discussed by the students. Furthermore, the sometimes close cooperation between the schools and the sheltered workshop for people with disabilities could be shown, as well as a lack of long-term support from independent careers advisers.

This investigation was a post-hoc, quantitative analysis of secondary academic performance and participation choices of Hispanic students. Three years of longitudinal student-level data was collected to examine the likelihood of college enrollment based on college and career readiness (CCR) factors. At the time of the study, CCR was defined as qualifying exam scores, credit for at least two advanced/dual enrollment courses, or enrollment in a career and technology education (CTE) coherent sequence of courses. Research participants (N = 803) consisted solely of Hispanic high school graduates from the 2014 cohort. Frequency statistics indicate 45.5% (n = 365) attended an institute of higher education (IHE) within 2 years of high school graduation. Findings reveal Hispanic females were more likely than Hispanic males to meet CCR indicators as well as postsecondary resiliency outcomes. Analysis of chi-square tests of independence suggests a moderately strong association exists between CCR indicators and postsecondary participation among high school graduates. Differences were found in terms of gender and postsecondary enrollment, x^2(6) = 24.538, p < .001. Differences were also found in terms of type of IHE and postsecondary resiliency, x^2(3) = 34.373, p < .001. More Hispanic CCR graduates enrolled at 2-year and 4-year IHE than expected by chance. While non-CCR graduates enrolled in IHE, they were less likely to meet postsecondary resiliency outcomes. CCR graduates who initially enrolled at 2-year IHE were also less likely to persist. Furthermore, the greatest contribution to differences in resiliency existed for Hispanic CCR graduates who enroll at 4-year IHE.