Purpose: Technological innovation and the flexibilisation of labour markets have expanded the pool of workers engaged in globally distributed work. This paper aims to propose an analytical framework to understand and support the productive professional learning of those engaged in global work. Drawing on the theory of expansive learning in the…

Professorships in Italy are assigned following public competitions. However, favouritism affects faculty hiring. Researchers lacking clientelistic support remain excluded from academia and are obliged to seek employment abroad or at non-university institutions, or to abandon their career. Do non-recruited researchers have better or worse…

This paper investigates employment outcomes for a large sample of Ph.D. students who were enrolled in a doctoral training program in Italy in the period 2008-14. The empirical analysis is based on survey data obtained from a questionnaire distributed to 23,500 individuals in 2016. In Italy, student enrolment in a Ph.D. involves a university-based…

Utilizing the Survey of Adult Skills from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and the OECD database, this study investigates the role of gender inequality and public social spending in the gender gap in Not in Employment, Education, or Training (NEET) risk across various age cohorts. The research identifies a…

It has long been known that Italy is characterized by the highest levels of professional regulation in Europe, but little attention has been given to the link between professional regulation and educational stratification. This article investigates the association between social origins and education by focusing on fields of study within tertiary…

This study compares the way IVET and CVET sub-systems interact to support the learning of adults, and thus facilitate lifelong and life-wide learning. By comparing the interaction between IVET and CVET sub-systems in the countries covered, the study analyses the extent to which IVET systems are opening up to adults, and questions whether national…

Purpose: Educational farms (EFs) serve a number of social and economic functions and are part of the debate about new learning environments, multifunctional agriculture and firm diversification. Through the analysis of a case study, this paper aims to identify strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) of EFs and key factors for…

This study addresses the gap in evidence on employability of people from disadvantaged groups in the context of the greening of the economy. We focus in particular on people with low qualifications (i.e. those with at most a lower secondary qualification (level 2 or below in the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED)). However,…

Students' degree choices are often made without an achieved vocational identity. In fact, some students perceive a discrepancy between their ambitions and their university course choices. In this preliminary study, I employed the interpretative phenomenological analysis approach to study the experiences of two master's degree economics students…

The research investigates the employment opportunities and outcomes for Italian graduates in business economics, after two decades from the beginning of the Bologna process. Preliminarily, the study identifies the predictors of the employment status of graduates one year after graduation. Subsequently, the job quality of the employed graduates is…

This study investigates the effects of studying abroad through the Erasmus Programme (EP), a European Union programme launched primarily to foster international mobility and cultural exchange of University students, on the school-to-work transition of university graduates. Since a satisfactory transition does not only mean finding a job, but also…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to acknowledge the value of joint educational entrepreneurship programs: universities impact on economic growth by building collaborative networks in order to encourage innovation through interdisciplinary training schemes. The case of the master's degree in Entrepreneurial Innovation Management, set up…

Many adult migrants lacking L2 linguistic autonomy cannot afford the time to master host countries' languages before providing for their basic needs. Thus, second language training that focuses on occupational integration is at times more urgent than a more generally social one, as the European 'language for work' approach suggests. Given the…

This paper proposes a novel approach to investigating the determinants of academic performance: GPA and time to degree. We match administrative records with questionnaire responses for a large set of undergraduate students from one Italian public university. By exploiting reforms implemented by the University, we estimate the effect of the excess…

When investigating students' motivations to enrol in university, a wide range of elements related to the overall student experience should be taken into account. The current study moves from this point to analyse students' choice factors from a survey completed by 27,504 students across 23 Italian institutions by means of a logistic principal…