Changes in educational policy in Russia will affect the proportion of young people who obtain their occupational qualifications in a university and in secondary-level professional training schools. There is currently a shortage of skilled blue-collar workers in Russia, and more needs to be done to ensure high-quality training for this sector of…

Public policy discourses claim that there is a "crisis" in the literacy and numeracy levels of the Australian workforce. In this paper, we propose a methodology for examining this "crisis" from a critical perspective. We draw on findings from an ongoing research project by the authors which investigates production workers'…

The dynamism of social processes, the development of technologies, and the modernization of industrial production require raising the education and qualifications of blue-collar workers, particularly working young people. This accounts for the focus on problems of that group's formation, their integration into society, their acquisition and…

Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) agencies provide a range of services to help people with disabilities become employed. How services are delivered, however, depends on several factors including client interests and abilities as well as economic opportunities within the local community. For better or worse, rural and urban clients face vastly…

The Great Recession that began in December 2007 laid bare many of the shortcomings of the American workforce, especially the lack of workers with postsecondary education. A large majority of jobs lost in the recession and in the recovery had been held by workers with a high school diploma or less. The only real gains made during the still…

For recent high school graduates, life is tough. In the past year, one in four young high school graduates was unemployed and over half were underemployed. In the past decade, recent high school graduates' wages have fallen by 12 percent to just $19,400 annually in 2011, below the poverty threshold for a family of four. The downward plight of high…

The organizational communication subdiscipline has made great strides in theory and research in recent years, but little is known about the workplace communication experiences of Latinas and Latinos in the United States. Even less is known about these sociocultural group members' experiences when they work in lower status, blue-collar roles in…

The study aimed to correlate the performance of Pohnpei Campus freshman students in the College of Micronesia-Federated States of Micronesia during the fall semester 2009 to students' socio-demographic characteristics, parents'/guardians' socio-demographic characteristics, and school characteristics. The Student Survey Questionnaire gathered data…

The recession that began in December of 2007 is already 30 months old, but the U.S. economy will not recover its pre-recession employment levels for at least another two years. From there, it will take an additional three years to make up for lost growth and create a job market strong enough to employ both the casualties of the recession and the…

For the very first time this in-depth paper studies the archives of the historic Paolo Pigna Paper Mill in Alzano Lombardo (Bergamo, Italy), which played a leading role in Italian history and culture: so much so that it ended up with fusing its own image to the very market where it operated, that is, the Italian schools. After being taken over by…

Research on young blue-collar workers in Russia indicates that a large percentage of them continue to improve their educational qualifications during the first five years of employment, but that it declines after that time. The two most frequent reasons for upgrading their skills are a desire to leave blue-collar employment, and to increase the…

Research on factors affecting the prestige of engineering and blue-collar occupations in Russia shows that, in addition to such things as intrinsic interest and expected income, young people's views are influenced by the kinds of people who typically go into various kinds of occupation.

Montessori educators follow Montessori's lead and use the word "work" to describe the child's concentrated attention with a hands-on material. But this word may lead to communication problems with parents and those in the non-Montessori world: educators, administrators, accreditors, and so on. These communication problems are…

The mighty heartland of the United States, the American Midwest, is certainly struggling economically. This region was the epicenter of America's industrial revolution, the arsenal of democracy in World War II, and the builder of the great blue-collar middle class that personified the American Dream. This important region made America a global…

The increasing desire to obtain a higher education in Russia is causing a growing disparity between educational qualifications and the needs of the labor market. Blue-collar jobs of varying levels are difficult to fill, and the demand for the qualification of those with degrees is not sufficient to avoid high levels of unemployment. Ways need to…