Empregabilidade nos recém licenciados da Faculdade de Motricidade Humana

Esta investigação enquadra-se nos estudos sobre o percurso académico e inserção profissional dos recém-licenciados dos anos letivos de 2007/08, 2008/09 e 2009/10 da Faculdade de Motricidade Humana (FMH) em colaboração com o Observatório da Empregabilidade da FMH. Tem como principal objetivo a caracterização do emprego dos recém-licenciados pela Faculdade. A metodologia aproveitou e aperfeiçoou uma plataforma eletrónica proprietária (AgonScopio v.1.7.51), para o desenvolvimento de questionários online, no meio Web. O universo do estudo foi representado pelos recém-licenciados dos três (3) anos letivos em estudo, das seguintes Licenciaturas: Ciências do Desporto, Ergonomia, Gestão do Desporto, Reabilitação Psicomotora e Dança. A amostra foi representada pelos resultados obtidos das duzentas e vinte e quatro (224) respostas conseguidas, de um universo de seiscentos e oitenta e seis (686) licenciados, permitindo caracterizar o comportamento dos recém-licenciados, de acordo com nove (9) dimensões estudadas, nomeadamente: dados gerais, enquadramento sociocultural com o objeto da FMH, primeiro emprego, formação, experiência profissional, trabalho e remuneração, expetativas, mobilidade e formação pós licenciatura. Aferimos que os recém-licenciados da FMH têm uma boa emprega-bilidade e o emprego é maioritariamente na sua área de formação. A maioria dos licenciados está empregada ao fim de 12 meses após a conclusão das suas licenciaturas (79,4%).

Empregabilidade nos récem licenciados da Faculdade de Motricidade Humana

A presente investigação enquadra-se nos estudos sobre o percurso académico e inserção profissional dos recém-licenciados dos anos letivos de 2010/11 e 2011/12 da Faculdade de Motricidade Humana, em colaboração com o Observatório da Empregabilidade da FMH. Tem como principal objetivo a caraterização do emprego dos recém-licenciados pela Faculdade. A metodologia aproveitou e aperfeiçoou uma plataforma eletrónica proprietária (AgonScopio v.1.7.51), para o desenvolvimento de questionários online, no meio Web. O universo do estudo foi representado pelos recém-licenciados dos dois anos letivos em estudo, das seguintes licenciaturas: Ciências do Desporto, Dança, Ergonomia, Gestão do Desporto e Reabilitação Psicomotora. A amostra foi representada pelos resultados obtidos das 105 respostas conseguidas, de um universo de 334 licenciados, permitindo caraterizar o comportamento dos recém-licenciados, de acordo com nove dimensões estudadas, nomeadamente: dados gerais, enquadramento sociocultural com o objeto da FMH, primeiro emprego, formação, experiência profissional, trabalho e remuneração, expetativas, mobilidade e formação pós licenciatura. Aferimos que os recém-licenciados da FMH possuem um bom índice de empregabilidade e o emprego é maioritariamente na sua área de formação. A maioria dos licenciados obtém emprego até 12 meses após a conclusão das respetivas licenciaturas (71%).

Successful Australian general practitioner doctoral candidates 2005-14

Aims/objectives:Appointment to higher academic positions and success in high prestige research grantsIn Australia requires the possession of a research based doctorate. With the expandingNeeds of general practice can we meet the need for suitably qualified applicants?Using a variety of public domain databases Australian GPs who lodged a doctoral thesis in a University library from 1 Jan 2005 to 31 Dec 2014 were identified.Content:In this time 73 of the current 32,000 registered general practitioners had doctoral thesis accepted; 48 of these were in the first five years.Median time for thesis submission is around 25 years after the primary medical qualification.Relevance/impact:The capability to expand GP academic departments and research output in Australia is hampered by low GP doctoral completion rates. Doctorates are achieved in a late stage of a professional career limiting the research career lifespan. More research opportunities have been identified as attracting younger graduates to general practice.Discussion:There is an urgent need to provide more practical and financial support to younger GPs to enable them to undertake academic career development. A clear career pathway with some stability of income is also needed.

Information literacy for a sustainable career in engineering and technology

Information literacy has become an important skill for undergraduate students due to societal changes that have seen information become a valuable commodity, the need for graduates to become lifelong learners to remain effective across their working lives, and the recognition by many stakeholders that information literacy is an underpinning generic skill for effective learning in higher education. Important elements in the design and delivery of information literacy training include the collaborative process between library and academic staff, the need to link generic information literacy skills into the specific discipline context of the students, and catering for a wide diversity in the student body including off-campus students. This paper describes a sequence of activities designed to help students learn and practice information literacy skills that have been purposefully designed and integrated into a first-year engineering and technology study unit as a core element of the unit syllabus.

Re-invent yourself: from London intensive care nursing and the Nigerian oil fields to an an academic library in Brisbane; a career change worth making.

A complete change of career forces a seismic shift in every aspect of your life. From day one, you have to face the loss of long held beliefs, behaviours, the known world of self, and security. We came from professions that themselves are poles apart, and many of the challenges we faced entering the profession were the same: juggling full-time work, part time study, and family commitmemts, taking a pay cut, and loss of social life. But over a short period of time we both transitioned to our new profession successfully. so what make our successful transition possible?

Improvising a future in the performing arts : a new strategy to help performance studies students successfully shift between academic culture, professional culture, industry and career?

If there is one thing performance studies graduates should be good at, it is improvising – play and improvisation are central to the contemporary and cultural performance practices we teach and the methods by which we teach them. Objective, offer, acceptance, advancing, reversing, character, status, manipulation, impression management, relationship management – whether we know them from Keith Johnson’s theatre theories or Erving Goffman’s theatre theories, the processes by which we play out a story, scenario or social situation to our own benefit are familiar. We understand that identity, action, interaction and its personal, aesthetic, professional or political outcomes are unpredictable, and that we need to adapt to changeable and uncertain circumstances to achieve our aims. Intriguingly, though, in a Higher Education environment that increasingly emphasises employability, skills in play, improvisation and self-performance are never cited as critical graduate attributes. Is the ability to play, improve and produce spontaneous new self-performances learned in the academy worth articulating into an ability to play, improvise and product spontaneous new self-performances after graduates leave the academy and move into the role of a performing arts professional in industry? A study of the career paths of our performance studies graduates over the past decade suggests that addressing the challenges they face in moving between academic culture, professional culture, industry and career in terms of improvisation and play principles may be very productive. In articles on performing arts careers, graduates are typically advised to find a market for their work, and develop career self-management, management and marketing skills, together with an ability to find, make and maintain relationships and opportunities for themselves. Transitioning to career is cast as a challenging process, requiring these skills, because performing arts careers do not offer the security, status and stability of other careers. Our data confirms this. In our study, though, we found that strategies commonly used to build the resilience, self-reliance and persistence graduates require – talking about portfolio careers, parallel careers, and portable, transferable or translatable skills, for example – can engender panic as easily as they engender confidence. In this paper, I consider what happens when we re-articulate some of the skills scholars and industry stakeholders argue are critical in allowing graduates to shift successfully from academy to industry in terms of skills like improvisation, play and self-performance that are already familiar, meaningful and much-practiced amongst performance studies graduates.

The Sessional Academic Success (SAS) project

The Sessional Academic Success (SAS) project is a sustainable, distributed model for supporting sessional staff at QUT. Developed by the Learning and Teaching Unit. SAS complements our Sessional Academic Program (SAP): a sequence of formal academic development workshops explained in complementary nomination. SAS recognises that while these programs are very well received and a crucial aspect of preparing and advancing sessional teachers, they are necessarily encapsulated in the moment of their delivery and are generic, as they address all faculties (with their varied cultures, processes and pedagogies). The SAS project extends this formal, centrally offered activity into local, ‘just in time’, ongoing support within schools. It takes a distributed leadership approach. Experienced sessional academics are recruited and employed as Sessional Academic Success Advisors (SASAs). They provide sessional staff in their schools with contextually specific, needs based, peer-to-peer development opportunities; one-on-one advice on classroom management and strategies for success; and help to trouble-shoot challenges. The SASAs are trained by the Learning and Teaching Unit co-ordinator, and ongoing support is provided centrally and by school-based co-ordinators. This team approach situates the SASAs at the centre of an organisation map (see diagram of support relationships below). The SAS project aims to support sessional staff in their professional development by: • Offering contextual, needs-based support at school level by harnessing local expertise; • Providing further development opportunities that are local and focal; SAS aims to retain Sessional Staff by: • Responding to self-nominated requests for support and ‘just in time’, safe and reliable advice in times of need; • Building sessional staff confidence through help with dealing with challenges from a trusted peer; • Building a supportive academic community for sessional staff, which helps them feel a part of faculty life, and a community of teaching practice. SAS aims to support sessional staff in the development of academic teaching careers by: • Recognising the capacity of experienced sessional staff to support their peers in ways that are unique, valuable and valued and providing the agency to do so; • Providing career advancement and leadership opportunities for sessional staff. SAS takes unique approaches within each school using strategies such as: • Welcomes and schools orientation by SASAs; • Regular check ins; face-to-face advice and online support; • Compiling local resources to complement university wide resources. • Sessional-to-sessional ‘just in time’ training (eg. assessment and marking when marking commences); • Peer feedback and mentoring (the opportunities to sit in more experiences sessionals’ classes; • Sessional staff awards (nominated by students); • Communities of practice to discuss topics and issues with a view to (and support for) publishing on learning and teaching. In these ways, SASAs complement support offered by unit coordinators, administrators, and the Learning and Teaching Unit. Pairing senior and ‘understudy’ advisors ensures a line of succession, sustainability and continuity. A pilot program commenced in 2012 involving three schools (Psychology and Social Work; Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Media, Entertainment and Creative Arts). It will be expanded across schools in 2013.

Factors affecting the career progress of academic accountants in Australia : cross-institutional and gender perspectives

Since the late 1980s, Australian highereducation has undergone significant reforms andpolicy changes based on economic rationalismand modernisation of management. This paperexamines the outcomes of the reform processesbased on the career attributes, status andperceptions of work environment of academicaccountants in Australian universities.Similarities and differences between academicaccountants are explored fromcross-institutional and gender perspectives.The data provide insight into a number ofsystemic inequalities between the older andmore established universities and the neweruniversities. In specific, across-institutional analysis based on fouruniversity types: Sandstones/Redbricks,Gumtrees, Unitechs and New (Marginson 1999)indicates that academic accountants in Newuniversities employ a much lower proportion ofstaff with PhD qualification, a weakerpublication profile, and perceive greaterbarriers for conducting research in terms of ashortage of research mentors, colleagues withresearch experience, and post-graduatestudents. Further, the commitment to flexiblelearning and delivery strategies iscomparatively stronger in Unitechs, and posesadditional demands on accounting academics'overall workload. Perceptions of gender-baseddiscrimination by female academic accountantsare generally stronger than their malecounterparts, particularly, in Newuniversities. These results raise severalissues for academic accountants at both theinstitutional and individual level in terms ofequal employment opportunities, management ofresearch programmes, development of teachingstrategies and individual time management.

Research mentoring on the edge : early career researchers and academic fringe-dwelling

Discourses of research leadership define not only what quality research leadership can and should be, but also identify those who speak and act with authority. Similarly, these discourses construct particular professional identities and idealised ‘ways of being’. They provide possibilities for research leaders as well as those categorised as 'Early Career Researchers' (ECRs) to create alternative identities and representations of themselves. This study reports the views of 32 academics across 16 Australian universities in four States about research mentoring and leadership for ECRs. The primary interest was to explore how research leadership is conceptualised, implemented and negotiated in the disciplinary fields of business, nursing and education. Whilst a number of ECRs viewed formal research mentoring as taking a ‘tick the box’ approach that they believed of limited value, a number of research leaders had different views. Most senior research leaders viewed the systemic provision of assistance their universities offered in a positive light. The dissonance in views centred on the subject positioning of academics in research. The dissatisfaction expressed by ECRs, a number of whom positioned themselves as fringe-dwellers ‘on the edge’ of their institutional research culture, raises questions about research sustainability and succession planning in Australian tertiary
institutions.

An early career academic network: what worked and what didn’t

This article documents the experiences of three early career academics trying to establish a network of early career academics (ECAs) in a middle-ranked university in Australia. The changing context of academia means that ECAs face considerable challenges in understanding and negotiating effective career paths. Some of the issues encountered include insecure employment arrangements; unclear and shifting expectations; heavy workloads and competing demands; and conflicting experiences around the collegiate culture of academia. As research and teaching institutions, universities must ensure the ongoing development of new academics. While there is a growing interest in exploring the issues confronted by new academics, much remains to be done to better understand, and improve, the pathways of academic development. To this end we reflect on our efforts to establish an ECA network that aimed to enhance professional development, facilitate an improved research culture and establish an informal peer support network. We did so through establishing an online presence for sharing information, hosting a series of professional development seminars and hosting a 2.5 day writing retreat. Our experiences suggest that, while efforts to enhance the capacity of ECAs are worthwhile, the very same pressures that our network was attempting to address were simultaneously creating barriers to ECA involvement in the network and its activities.

Gender, Professional Networks, and Subjective Career Success within Early Academic Science Careers: The Role of Gender Composition in Inside and Outside Departmental Support Networks

The present study analyzed (a) gender differences in the gender composition (i.e., the proportion of male to female contacts) of professional support networks inside and outside an individual’s academic department and (b) how these differences in gender composition relate to subjective career success (i.e., perceived career success and perceived external marketability). Results showed that the networks’ gender composition is associated with subjective career success. Men’s networks consist of a higher proportion of male to female supporters, which, in turn, was positively related to subjective career success. Additional analyses revealed that the findings could not be accounted for by alternative factors, such as network size, networking behaviors, and career ambition.

Founder, Academic, or Employee? A Nuanced Study of Career Choice Intentions

We add novel insights to the debate about why individuals choose to start their own firm by comparing entrepreneurial intentions to the intentions to work at a university as an academic and to be employed in a private firm. To model this more complex set of career choices, we examine novel multiplicative aspects of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and test our hypotheses on survey data of 15,866 students from 13 European countries. Multinomial logistic regression analyses reveal how the different TPB elements influence career preferences and demonstrate the moderating effects of perceived controllability and desirability.