We investigated the mediating effect of vocational identity in the relationship between mindfulness and career adaptability among graduates in the early career stage. A quantitative survey research design was used to obtain data from 200 participants who were graduates from a higher education institution in South Africa. Variance-based structural…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) globally heavily depend on the resilience of academic staff members to achieve excellence in teaching and learning. The extant scholarly work on resilience seems to take the relationship between workplace environmental factors (WEFs) and the adverse experiences of resilience among women academics for granted.…

This article focuses on the navigation and negotiation of a Zulu student on a diverse university campus in South Africa. Students in higher education institutions bring their life stories, shaped by lived experiences, culture, history, and language, to the campus, while the interconnection between race, language, culture, and gender creates new…

Self-assessment involves students making judgements about their own learning. Self-assessment is promoted widely due to its benefits for lifelong learning. However, students often find self-assessment mechanical, useless and redundant -- indeed "inauthentic." This may partly result from understanding self-assessment as an instrumental…

Background: Children within historically disadvantaged non-Western South African communities are considered as particularly vulnerable to the development of anxiety problems. Although the need for accessible mental health interventions is evident, this need has remained unmet in a country with extreme socio-economic disparities and a lack of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) and self-perceived employability (SPE) affect students' choice of an entrepreneurial career path. Design/methodology/approach: A survey approach was used to gather data from 274 final year undergraduate students at a South African university. The study made…

This article reports on a study that tested theory predicting differences in personality endowments between first-year and second-year accounting students, as well as the potential influence of personality on academic performance in the context of a large South African university. Data from 1 380 first-year and second-year accounting students was…

Background: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) educators and stakeholders in South Africa are interested in the ways STEM students make their career decisions because of the shortages in these critical skills. Although various factors including family, teachers, peers, and career interest have been reported as determinants of…

This research describes the results of a national survey of entrepreneurial mindset conducted with 3,194 randomly selected individuals in a representative national sample. Several other measures of entrepreneurial personal characteristics appear in the literature. These include the Entrepreneurial Attitude Orientation measure (cf. EAO, Robinson,…

This article reports on integrative career counselling provided to a creative young man selected purposefully. An explorative, descriptive, instrumental, single case-study approach was followed, and two recently developed questionnaires (one qualitative and one quantitative) were used to collect the data. A career construction counselling…

This research sets out to conduct a baseline study on personality traits of student teachers to assess the possible implications for an optimal person-environment fit or unfortunate misfit. A non-experimental quantitative research design was used and data were obtained by administering the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) to 835 student…

Characteristics of temperament have been shown to predict aspects of personality and psychopathology. Approach temperament (i.e., sensitivity, reactivity, and behavioral disposition toward reward stimuli) may be a particularly salient predictor of developmental outcomes (e.g., Nigg, 2006; Shiner & Caspi, 2003). However, there is little…

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…

First-generation students are often described as disadvantaged in university adjustment, self-efficacy and grades. Yet this deficit model of understanding first-generation students ignores their cultural capital, which could increase resilience and resourcefulness. Here, 844 students (31% first-generation) in South Africa and Canada completed…

Promoting teacher professionalism is regarded as a strategy to address the disparate quality of learning in South African classrooms. Through a qualitative analysis of initial teacher education (ITE) programmes offered by five universities, this paper analyses the messages of teacher professionalism transmitted to pre-service teachers. Findings…