Universities tend to focus on the hard skills required within disciplines, with a general lack of focus on the teaching of soft skills, specifically in the hard sciences, while a graduate with good attributes ought to have both. There is an uncertainty over whose responsibility it is to teach soft skills between industry and universities, with the…

It is important to note from the outset that the duty of preparing students for careers rests with the educational community. Internship before graduation appears to offer students experiential learning, better opportunities for employment and better knowledge of real work environments. The institutions benefit by obtaining more resources at a…

Organisations function in a flexible and changing environment that requires dynamic responses to diverse forces influencing their sustainability and growth. Employers wish to recruit graduates who can capably and successfully transfer their university-acquired skills and knowledge to the workplace. The aim of this qualitative study is to explore…

The objective of this article is to determine whether the professional skills demonstrated by newly employed first-year trainee accountants (i.e. their performance) meet the expectations of audit managers and, if they do not, to determine the size of the expectation--performance gap. A questionnaire was used to determine the expectations and the…

Purpose: A fundamental assumption of the apprenticeship model is that there are benefits to both employers and individual learners. This study offers a broad conceptual interrogation of this inherent assumption underpinning the apprenticeship model. Approach: This study combines analysis of literature and available data and draws upon…

A crisis of student funding has led to most South African universities being closed for weeks, after protests in 2015 and again in 2016. A policy response to these events requires insight into relationships between higher education, society, and the economy. This paper interrogates the assumptions which underpin current approaches to measuring…

In this study, we argue that there are unemployed information sector graduates who could benefit greatly from infopreneurship if more awareness and popularization of the practice were achieved. The purpose of this study was to investigate the status and development of infopreneurship in Nigeria and South Africa. The study focused on…

This article investigates the relevance of the National Certificate Vocational (NCV) tourism programme for the South African tourism industry in terms of skills needed by tourism students to work in the tourism industry after graduating. The NCV programmes were introduced in 2007 at public Further Education and Training Colleges (now Technical,…

Work-integrated learning (WIL) has been identified as a way of equipping graduates with attributes that make them work-ready. Many higher education institutions (HEIs) require their students to go through a compulsory work place learning form (WPL) of WIL. The complications of WPL can affect HEIs' student throughput. To address this challenge, a…