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Significance: This study provides the first systematic needs assessment of a U.S. business region to determine if businesses want international skills taught in community college technical and occupational programs. Without this assessment, community college leaders and faculty are not able to determine whether they are adequately preparing students in these skills to be successful in tomorrow's fast paced, mobile and integrated global workforce. Research Aims: 1. Conduct a needs assessment to determine whether international skills were considered important for employment entry or movement 2. Determine where businesses obtain international skills training. 3. Garner business recommendations for the improvement of international skills education in community college technical and occupational programs. Research Questions: 1. What international skills do surveyed U.S. business and industry executives believe are important for the sub-baccalaureate technical/occupational employees that they hire and promote? 2. How do surveyed U.S. business and industry executives engage their companies' sub-baccalaureate technical/occupational employees in international skills training programs? 3. How do surveyed business and industry executives think U.S. community college technical/occupational degree programs should change with respect to their international skills objectives? Methods: This study utilized a researcher created and empirically validated survey and two focus groups. The survey was sent to 1,920 businesses randomly sampled from Tampa Bay's 64,000 businesses. Response data from 145 returned questionnaires were analyzed and then discussed by business and community college focus groups. Findings: 1. Appreciation of Cross Cultural Differences and Foreign Language Skills were rated significantly (p< [or] = .05) higher higher in importance than other international skills. 2. Businesses utilize in-house trainers more often than any other type of training resource for international training. Community Colleges are rarely used as a training resource for international skills. 3. Community colleges should investigate whether to increase their academic outreach to businesses, mandate foreign language training in programs, and emphasize learning about other world areas in the curriculum. 4. Nation-wide surveys of Fortune 500 firms to determine international business practices and training needs may not translate to regional business communities.

Thesis (MBA)--University of Limpopo, 2010. / Skills development plays an important role in the growth of every country‟s economy, service delivery and technology improvement. It builds confidence and dignity in people, so it is crucial for every government to ensure that its people are well-skilled and developed. Hence the formation of Sector Education and Training Authority which ensures that employees are also trained in their workplace; this initiative is also meant to address imbalances of the past. Local Government Sector Education and Training Authority were established to ensure skills development within the local government sector. Local government (municipalities) is the third sphere of government which interacts very closely with the community and delivers basic services like water and sanitation, roads, electricity, refuse removal, housing and other essential services. For all these services to be provided efficiently and effectively the municipality needs competent and skilled employees, if they do not have the skilled employees they will have challenges in delivering these services. Proper training and development is continuously needed as technology changes and new developments are uncovered in the industry. It will be imperative for the municipalities to work in hand with Local Government Sector Education and Training Authority to ensure that training and development is delivered to the employees, and funding is allocated every year. Continuous research need to be conducted to ensure best practices of training and development are adhered to. The qualitative research method was followed for this research. A questionnaire was used to collect the data from participants and a follow-up interview was conducted with participants. During the follow-up interviews a number of supporting documents were received. Two people from each of the six municipalities took part in the research totaling twelve participants. It was discovered that Local Government Sector Education and Training Authority helps the municipalities with skills development issues, though there are gaps which still need to be closed. Municipalities are also making efforts to ensure that their employees are skilled. However, municipalities can still improve their skills analysis processes, implement performance management system for their employees and increase their training and development budget.

Child abduction is a serious problem in the U.S.; therefore, it is essential that researchers evaluate the efficacy of currently available abduction prevention programs. This study evaluated the efficacy of a commercially-available abduction prevention program, The Safe Side. The participants included six 6-8-year old children with no prior abduction prevention training. A non-concurrent multiple baseline across participants design was used to evaluate the effects of the training. The participants' safety responses were assessed using in situ assessments within two different situations (responding to a knock on the door of the participant's home and interaction by a stranger in public) and scored numerically. Any participant who failed to perform the appropriate safety skills following the post video training assessment received in situ training implemented by the parent. Additional assessments were subsequently conducted until each participant demonstrated the desired safety skills to criterion (three consecutive correct scores). In situ training was continually conducted as necessary.

Mental-state and emotion understanding are important constructs for successful interpretation of behaviour and interaction with others. While false-belief understanding has been the main focus of investigations into children�s mentalising over the past 30 years, we now have tasks available that allow assessment of a broader range and more advanced set of mentalising skills amongst older age groups of typically developing young people (Baron-Cohen, Jolliffe, Mortimore, & Robertson, 1997a; Baron-Cohen, O�Riordan, Stone, Jones, & Plaisted, 1999; Happé, 1994). A recent trend has seen a shift away from investigating when children attain these skills towards examining individual differences in their performance. This has included consideration of both the factors that contribute to (Carlson & Moses, 2001; Hughes & Dunn, 1997; Meins et al., 2002; Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007; Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002), and the factors that are influenced by (Astington & Jenkins, 2000; Cassidy, Werner, Rourke, Zubernis, & Balaraman, 2003; Diesendruck & Ben-Eliyahu, Repacholi, Slaughter, Pritchard, & Gibbs, 2003) individual differences in mental-state understanding. One of the interesting questions in this area is what are the subsequent benefits or harm that individual differences in mentalising and emotion skills hold for children�s social competence? The current study investigates young people�s growing socioemotional understanding and how it is related to their social abilities, both prosocial and antisocial. The aims were to provide information on the relations amongst advanced mental-state skills, to investigate how these skills were related to emotion understanding, and, further, to investigate how socioemotional skills were related to social competence. The current study also extended the literature by addressing these aims amongst older children. Two studies were conducted, involving children (4- to 7-years) seen on four occasions in a three-year longitudinal study, and adolescents (13- to 17-years) in a cross-sectional study. There were a number of key findings. Individual differences in children�s advanced mental-state understanding are relatively stable across time, and the relations which they show with emotion skills are more consistent when examining tasks that shared skill sets. Language plays an important mediating role in the relation between socioemotional skills, although this influence appears to decrease with age. Mental-state and emotion understanding are both important for children and adolescents� social competence. It seems that greater socioemotional abilities influence prosocial behaviours, and poorer socioemotional abilities influence antisocial behaviours. Overall, the current study provides evidence that socioemotional skills are overlapping but distinct constructs, that they show varied interactions in social settings, and that future investigations of how children come to understand and interact with others will be best served by careful consideration of appropriate measures and by including multiple aspects of children�s social cognition.

A significant number of engineers move into management positions, their numbers increasing with their length of service. However, engineers are not considered to be effective managers and are generally considered inadequate in soft skills. Given the centrality of engineers and management, understanding this transition is essential in order to develop strategies for managing. This research is an exploratory field-based study of the transition of professional engineers into management roles (engineer-managers) in Australia, from the perspective of the individual engineer. The study investigates the attitudes of engineers towards such areas as engineering education, towards managerial transition, status, organizational support systems, and strategies for managing transition, and examines their influence on the process of transition. Importantly, this research examines the influence of factors such as job nature, management qualifications, age, employing organizations, and other variables on their attitudes, and studies the differences between various subgroups of engineers. This research is based on the results of a case study and a questionnaire survey. An important outcome of this research is the focus on the process of engineering education. This research concludes that different emphases in the process of teaching and learning would contribute, in the long run, to engineers developing soft skills, and so make their transition into management easier. The study found that electrical engineers are more proactive than civil or mechanical engineers and that it is necessary to develop different strategies for different groups of engineers. The study observed that the higher the status of professional engineers within an organization, the greater was the likelihood of success. Supporting the anecdotal evidence from the case study, it is noted that the more engineers there are in management positions, the better the perception of senior management about their capabilities. This study found that management education for engineers has a strong influence, both in terms of their acquiring managerial skills as well as enhancing their status within their organization. Experiential learning, though, is the most common method by which engineers acquire managerial skills. The study also found that this is the least-managed strategy in Australian organizations; learning is left entirely to the individual. For engineers to be able to take advantage of experiential learning, better management is necessary / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>Professionals currently working in consulting firms and job-applicants aiming to work in this industry are very often finding themselves in a situation where they experience a skill-gap regarding the skills consulting firms have claimed as the must-have ones. Confusion about which are those skills has increased since from academics to professionals, from researchers to higher education institutions and from students and graduates to job-searchers, they all have a different understanding of which ones are those skills. In fact even from one consulting firm to the next one the skills differ. Moreover current and available literature is yet to explore deeper the project teams working for consulting firms in order to grasp a real understanding and easy identification of these skills, since studies so far have provided mixed set of skills for traditional project teams rather than for consulting project-teams leading to mixed discoveries and inconclusive results. The findings in this study provide support for a controversial discussion occurring when trying to identify the skills consultants affirm their employer require and how these companies acquire, foster and retain these skills.</p>

<p><strong><p>Abstract</p><p><strong>Aim:</strong> The purpose of this study was to gain a deeper knowledge of how nurse anesthetists feel about their own profession. It was hoped that by gaining a deeper understanding of how the nurse anesthetist is experiencing its own profession, it will create better conditions for development and evolution of the nurse anesthesia profession and skills. <strong>Method:</strong> for the study a qualitative approach was used in which ten anesthesia nurses were interviewed, aged 27-55 years, four men and six women participated in the study. The interviews were processed and analyzed based on qualitative content analysis. As a theoretical framework Patricia Benner seven skill domains was used. <strong>Result:</strong> the analysis resulted in six themes: <em>1. Difficult working conditions which are handled by its own systematic controls. 2. The meaning of being a professional nurse anesthetist. 3. Satisfaction for professionals, has a good relationship with the patient, family, team and develop their professional role. 4. Poor health professionals, has its own misjudgements and situations are not self-control. 5. Prerequisites for a good teamwork, clear communication, trust with their colleagues and to be responsive within the team. 6. A characteristic of the lack of team co-operation is lack of communication and trust, and to feel redundant in the professional role. </em>The category <em>less important</em> remained at the category level. <strong>Conclusion:</strong> the results show that despite the anesthesia nursing regarded as an independent professional, anesthesia nurses were very dependent on the team around them. The conclusion is that much emphasis is placed on being able to work independently and to have good medical knowledge in the field, but it is also important to be able to cooperate and respected by other team members.</p></strong></p> / <p><strong><p>Sammanfattning</p><strong><p>Syfte:</p></strong>studiens syfte var att få en djupare kunskap om hur anestesisjuksköterskan upplever sin egen profession. Förhoppningen var att genom att få en djupare kunskap om hur anestesisjuksköterskan upplever sitt arbete skapa bättre förutsättningar för utveckling och vidareutveckling av anestesisjuksköterskans yrkesroll och kompetens. <strong>Metod:</strong> för studien användes en kvalitativ metod där tio anestesisjuksköterskor intervjuades i åldrarna 27-55 år, fyra män och sex kvinnor deltog i studien. Intervjuerna bearbetades och analyserades utifrån kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Som teoretisk referensram används Patricia Benners sju kompetensdomäner. <strong>Resultat</strong>: resultatet utmynnade i sex teman, <em>1. Svåra arbetsförhållanden hanteras med eget systematiskt kontrollsystem. 2. <strong></strong>3. Tillfredställande för professionen är god relation till patient, anhörig, teamet och att utveckla sin yrkesroll. 4. Otillfredsställande för professionen är egna missbedömningar och situationer man inte själv kan råda över.<strong> </strong>5<strong>. </strong>Förutsättningar för ett bra teamarbete är tydlig kommunikation, att känna tillit till sina kollegor och vara lyhörd inom teamet. 6. Utmärkande för bristande teamsamarbete är bristande kommunikation och tillit, samt att känna sig överflödig i yrkesrollen. Kategorin mindre betydelsefullt stannade på kategori nivå.</em> <strong>Slutsats:</strong> resultatet visar att trots att anestesisjuksköterskeyrket betraktas som ett självständigt yrke, var anestesisjuksköterskorna mycket beroende av teamet runt omkring dem. Slutsatsen är att stor vikt läggs på att kunna arbeta självständigt och att ha goda medicinska kunskaper inom området, men det är även betydelsefullt att kunna samarbeta och respekteras av övriga team medlemmar. </strong></p>

The aim of this thesis is to study (1) the impact of physicians' locus of control (LOC) on their communication styles in interviews with cancer patients as well as (1) the impact of physicians' LOC on their acquisition of effective communication skills in a communication skills training program. LOC is a generalised belief regarding the extent to which life outcomes are controlled by an individual's actions (“internal” LOC) or by external forces such as luck, fate or other individuals (“external” LOC). (1) Although is it widely recognised that physicians' characteristics could influence their communication styles and may thus interfere with a patient-centred communication, no empirical evidence is currently available. No studies are available on the impact of physicians' LOC on their communication skills. It was hypothesised that physicians with an “external” LOC have a different communication style than physicians with an “internal” LOC. Eighty-one voluntary physicians with a practice in oncology were recorded performing an actual and a simulated interview with a cancer patient as wall as an actual and a simulated interview with a cancer patient and a relative. Physicians' communication skills were assessed using the Cancer Research Campaign Workshop Evaluation Manual. Physicians' LOC was assessed using the Rotter I-E scale. Communication skills of the upper and lower quartiles of physicians in respect of their scores on this scale were compared using Student's t-test. Results show that physicians with “external” LOC give more appropriate information than physicians with “internal” LOC in simulated interviews with a cancer patient (P=0.011) and less premature information than physicians with “internal” LOC in clinical interviews with a cancer patient (P=0.015). Moreover, in actual interviews with a cancer patient and a relative, physicians with an “external” LOC talked more to the relative (P=0.017) and used more utterances with an assessment function (P=0.010) than physicians with an “internal” LOC. In simulated interviews with a cancer patient and a relative, physicians with an “external” LOC used less utterances giving premature information (P=0.031) and used more utterances with a supportive function such as empathy and reassurance (P=0.029) than physicians with an “internal” LOC. (2) Although it is widely recognised that educational interventions may be more effective for people with an “internal” LOC compared to people with an “external” LOC, no study has yet assessed the influence of physicians' LOC on communication skills learning. This study aims to test the hypothesis that, in a communication skills training program, physicians with an “internal” LOC would demonstrate communication skills acquisition to a greater degree than those with an “external” LOC. A non-randomised longitudinal intervention study was conducted between January 1999 and April 2001. Sixty-seven volunteer physicians from private and institutional practice in Belgium participated to a learner-centred, skills-focused, practice-oriented communication skills training program. Communication skills changes were assessed in 2 standardised simulated interviews before and after training (one two-person and one three-person interview). Communication skills were assessed using the Cancer Research Campaign Workshop Evaluation Manual. Physicians' LOC was assessed using the Rotter I-E scale. Communication skills changes of the upper and lower third of physicians in respect of their scores on this scale were compared using group by time repeated measures of variance. In the two-person and three-person interviews, the increase in open directive questions was more important among physicians with an “internal” LOC compared to physicians with an “external” LOC (P=0.066 and P=0.004 respectively). In the three-person interview, the increase in directive questions (P=0.001), in assessing functions (P=0.002) and in the use of moderate feelings stated explicitly (P=0.011) was more important among physicians with an “internal” LOC compared to physicians with an “external” LOC. Conclusion. These results provide evidence that physicians' LOC can influence their communication styles as well as the efficacy of a communication skills training program. Physicians' awareness of first results constitutes a step towards a tailoring of their communication skills to every patient's and relative's concerns and needs and thus towards a patient-centred communication. The second results support the idea that a psychological characteristic such as "internal" LOC may facilitate communication skills acquisition through physicians' belief that communication with patients may be controlled by physicians themselves.

Increasing unemployment and low economic growth are of growing concern in the world economy and a recognised intervention to combat these challenges is entrepreneurship. Tourism has been acknowledged as an underexploited sector with considerable potential for addressing these challenges. In order to advance entrepreneurial activity, it is essential for students to possess the necessary entrepreneurial skills. However, the absence of consensus on the content of training courses and curricula is currently a concern in the field of entrepreneurship. South African higher education institutions need to redefine their roles and academics should take heed, and ensure that the curricula that they provide correspond with the requirements of practitioners. Through analysing the development skills of successful entrepreneurs, the focus of training courses and curricula can be established. This study constitutes exploratory research into an important issue facing many higher education institutions today and is supported by a detailed literature review and an empirical study. Higher education institutions have to remain competitive due to the turbulent and changeable environment within which they operate. The literature review, in accordance with the scope and limitations of the study, concentrated on the principles of tourism management, together with the entrepreneurial and marketing development skills essential to tourism entrepreneurs. For the empirical part of the study, a self-administered questionnaire was sent to a sample of tourism enterprise owners, tourism management academics and tourism management students. The objective was to develop a set of guidelines for the content of the entrepreneurship and marketing subjects for tourism management students. The research findings provide a balanced view in that they incorporate the perceptions of tourism enterprise owners, tourism management academics and tourism management students. The skills analysed within this study, together with the suggested implementation method, can be used to guide the structured integration of the development of these skills into tourism management programmes. The intention of the study was to cover a wide range of entrepreneurial and marketing development skills essential for the tourism entrepreneur, so that a clear set of skills could be formulated for the recommended inclusion into the content of tourism entrepreneurship and marketing curricula. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Business Management))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2009.