Professional Employees (professional + employee)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Minimum and preferred entry qualifications and training provision for North Australian workers

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2006
Bruce Acutt
This paper reports on the outcomes of a replication study of a survey of British employers that requested information on the qualifications sought when recruiting employees and on subsequent training and development. While the British survey was interested in the uptake and use of the British National Vocational Qualifications, the study reported in this article is primarily focused on the uptake and use of the Australian Qualifications Framework qualifications by North Australian employers. This study was prompted by the skills shortages and recruitment difficulties being experienced by organizations throughout rural and regional Australia. Previous studies have found that vocational qualifications were not valued by UK employers and few employers were encouraging employees to undertake vocational awards. If this is also the case in Australia, it may in part explain problems in recruiting skilled workers. This research clearly demonstrates that employees in regional and rural Australia are seeking to improve their knowledge and skills through vocational training and higher education qualifications. Also, employers are providing access to training and are supporting managerial and professional employees to gain higher educational qualifications. When recruiting all types of worker other than unskilled labourers, the majority of organizations prefer to recruit workers with qualifications. In rural and regional centres, however, a more pragmatic stance of recruiting unqualified employees in some areas is observed. Clearly, employers will attempt to minimize training costs by recruiting skilled employees, but in the end they will have to provide access to training and education to ensure that they have a skilled workforce that can deliver essential services and products. [source]


Being there: the acceptance and marginalization of part-time professional employees

JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, Issue 8 2003
Thomas B. Lawrence
Part-time professional employees represent an increasingly important social category that challenges traditional assumptions about the relationships between space, time, and professional work. In this article, we examine both the historical emergence of part-time professional work and the dynamics of its integration into contemporary organizations. Professional employment has historically been associated with being continuously available to one's organization, and contemporary professional jobs often bear the burden of that legacy as they are typically structured in ways that assume full-time (and greater) commitments of time to the organization. Because part-time status directly confronts that tradition, professionals wishing to work part-time may face potentially resistant work cultures. The heterogeneity of contemporary work cultures and tasks, however, presents a wide variety of levels and forms of resistance to part-time professionals. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model that identifies characteristics of local work contexts that lead to the acceptance or marginalization of part-time professionals. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between a work culture's dominant interaction rituals and their effects on co-workers' and managers' reactions to part-time professionals. We then go on to examine the likely responses of part-time professionals to marginalization, based on their access to organizational resources and their motivation to engage in strategies that challenge the status quo. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Location, Location, Location: Does Place of Work Really Matter?

BRITISH JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT, Issue 2009
Tom Redman
This paper examines the work attitudes of home- and office-based workers. A review of the existing literature finds both pessimistic and optimistic accounts of the impact of homeworking on employee attitudes and behaviours. Drawing on a survey of 749 managerial and professional employees in knowledge-intensive industries, the study finds more support for the optimistic perspective. The findings suggest that homeworking is positively associated with employee well-being and a more balanced work,home relationship. There is no evidence that organizational citizenship behaviours are reduced by homeworking but there is some support for homeworking undermining employees' perception of the organization as supporting their careers and personal development. [source]