Demographic changes, such as the ageing of society and the decline of the birth rate, are gradually leading to the loss of valuable knowledge and experience in the Dutch Labour market. This necessitates an explicit focus on workers' sustainable employment so that they can add value to the organisation throughout their career. This study looks into the way in which the workers' motivation might affect their investments into their own sustainable employment. It was conducted in a major industrial service provider, Sitech Services. The conclusion is that intrinsic motivation plays an important role in both younger and older employees, and that the younger workers undertake more action in order to give physical form to their sustainable employment than their older colleagues.
Frequent claims are made for the importance of the hospitality industry, and wider tourism sector, as potential and actual creators of employment. Many of these claims emanate from industry representative and advocacy organizations, often as part of their legitimate efforts to lobby governments for favourable treatment of their sectors. Good quality universal statistical data on employment in hospitality are noticeable by their absence, although information collected by bodies such as the International Labour Organization is extensive. This paper reviews the current state of data availability on global hospitality employment (with a primary focus on commercial hospitality operations) and seeks to employ these secondary sources in investigating the question as to whether we can in fact make plausible statements about the extent of such employment. This exercise is important both to contextualizing claims made for the employment generating capacity of the hospitality industry and to shedding light on the degree of seriousness with which data might be treated in wider policy contexts. The paper concludes, with cautious optimism, that commercial hospitality is a significant global employer and that the claims made for this employment by representative and advocacy organizations are plausible if treated with circumspection.
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Introduction This study aims to advance theoretical development on digital transformation (DT) skills that are essential for sustainable employment. Rapid and continuous advancements of digital technology, such as increased automation, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, cloud computing, robotics and internet of things (IoT), lead to huge transformations for society, economy, and its organizations (Ivaldi et al., 2022; Trenerry et al., 2021). For organizations to successfully transform, it is important to strongly invest in an organizational learning climate, while for employees, investment in the sustainability of their employment is key. Therefore, one of the greatest challenges is to identify and develop essential skills that contribute to both the collective learning climate and employment sustainability (Ivaldi et al., 2022). Because previous scientific literature has focused predominantly on mapping general 21st century skills, digital competences of citizens, or essential skills for specific professions, it remains largely unclear which employee skills are essential in the context of DT. Hence, the contribution of this study lies in identifying these essential skills and developing a comprehensive DT skills framework. The following research question is central: Which DT skills are essential for sustainable employment and how can these skills be synthesized into a DT skills framework?
In an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world, traditional disciplinary approaches to the framing and resolution of social and economic problems deliver ever diminishing returns.Discussions abound, therefore, about how best to educate and prepare graduates for the fresh challenges of the 21st century.Knowledge Alliances between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and enterprises which aim to foster innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, employability, knowledge exchange and/or multidisciplinary teaching and learning are therefore becoming increasingly necessary and relevant. The challenge is to determine what we should teach in the future and how it should be taught. The changing nature of contemporary society highlights that social issues are often highly complex and multifaceted.The aim of this Action is to demonstrate, through the adoption of Multi-Disciplinary Innovation (MDI) methods, how we can respond to social problems with a design-led approach which has a problem-oriented ethos, supporting positive social change and the development of international public policy discourse. It will be achieved through the establishment of a Pan-European Public Sector Innovation (ePSI) lab. It will prepare students for roles in employment by integrating education programmes into the lab’s operations and it will support agencies that have a role in responding to and developing public policy.COST action on social innovation in labs
Helping business networks and clusters to collaborate in international value chains and interregional collaborations as part of regional growth strategies.[project in progress]To improve regional/national policy instruments seeking to intensify clusterization processes (especially in KETs related sectors), fostering clusters’ and business networks interregional cooperation, integration into innovative value chains and better employment for the implementation of smart specialization strategies.
This project aims to contribute to the transition from proprietary smart city software to the design & employment of ‘public software’ that can be deployed by cities in their operational and policy processes, in order to better safeguard public values. With the advance of smart city technologies, software deployed by municipalities can no longer be understood as just a productivity tool. The mechanics and algorithms operative in the software and the data it collects have become key elements in the execution of urban policy and have started to become a resource for decision making processes. That means that transparency and data-ownership are becoming important public values in software deployment. Most proprietary software systems that cities are currently using in their operations do not fulfill these requirements. Therefore a transition is needed to the deployment of what we call public software. To bring this transition about, for municipal governments it is important to learn more about the process in which public software can be procured, deployed and shared between cities. For creative industries players such as developers and creative agencies, it is important to gain further knowledge about what role they can play in this process and learn more about possible business models to sustain the production and upkeep of public software. This project addresses these knowledge gaps through three workshops in which the most important issues for this transition will be identified, leading to a Guide for the Deployment of Public Software as well as a research agenda and an international network of stakeholders.
