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Exploring the skill and career development expectations of mature IT field engineering personnel - a Grounded Theory approach
No full textThis study aimed to investigate the skills and capabilities and organisational support required by older or mature IT field engineering workers to remain effective in the changing information technology industry. The purpose of the research was to equip CompanyX, a leading information technology organisation who employ a population of ageing IT engineering workers with an understanding of the career development activities that will benefit the personnel they employ as they move into a later career stage.
The research was undertaken as a grounded theory study of CompanyX and qualitative in nature utilising constructivist grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2006). Semi structured interviews were used to capture and create data from a sample population aged 45 and over. The analysis highlighted the mature IT field engineers benefited from a vast amount of accumulated skill and knowledge by virtue of their long tenure in the IT industry however their ongoing value may not be fully understood by their resource managers and the organisation. The research presented the mature IT field engineer’s realisation of the need for new skills to remain productive and effective in the future workforce and the importance of a job with the flexibility to accommodate the demands of external life factors that may change their work life priorities.
The research identified two significant contributions to theory. The emergence of the importance of understanding the mature IT field engineer perception of self-worth and value which was historically positive earlier in their tenure due to the high demand for their original technical skills and the job they performed but found to be diminished in recent times because of both skills and professional obsolescence. The research indicates it will be beneficial to change the resource manager style from an authoritative approach to a collaborative coaching style focusing on value over productivity metrics, to redesign jobs to minimise the impact of ageing and increase work life flexibility in addition to investment in future focussed skills to ensure the IT field engineering career remains relevant which will contribute to the mature IT field engineer’s perception of self-worth and value and meaningful contributions.
The second contribution to theory builds on the initial contribution and positions the emergence of self-worth and value as the primary consideration when seeking to understand the mature IT field engineers’ professional identities, in favour of perceiving value as the accumulation of technical certification and accreditation positioned within existing research (Tsakissiris,2015; Smith, 2016; Rahmatika, 2022). The findings reinforced technical training and certification remain important to mature IT field engineers as evidence of competency, however the debilitating effect of skills obsolescence even with a vast array of existing IT technical certifications has repositioned the importance of understanding the engineer’s perception of their self-worth and value.
Several contributions to practice were recommended by this research. However, the most significant contributions include a suggestion for the British Computer Society (BCS) to apply greater focus to older IT worker skills development and elevate the value and perceived status of professional membership, CompanyX to reward mature IT field engineers for knowledge sharing and reuse, the need for mature IT field engineers to take increased responsibility for their own skills & career development and for managers to assist the mature IT field engineers with the adaptation of their historical engineer professional identities
Extracting the components of Psychological Contracts of Hotel employees in Northern Germany
Get PDFExtracting the components of Psychological Contracts of Hotel employees in Northern Germany
Paper’s importance
Hotels around the world have been experiencing dangerous levels of labour shortage and high turnover (Hwang et al. 2014; Ma, Ren and Zhao 2021). These phenomena have been affecting both developed and emerging markets and staff retention is now an action priority for practitioners (dwif consulting 2022; Salama et al. 2022). The shortage of qualified labour has already caused noticeable economic damage in some regions (Müggler, Liechti and Schärrer 2022). In Northern Germany, tourism constitutes a key industry with a wide range of other sectors depending on it (SGVSH 2020); as the region, particularly its rural and remote areas, is facing developmental marginalization (Siedentop and Stroms 2021; Wolf 2016), stabilizing the industry is an important task.
Theoretical base
This research takes the position of Rousseau (1989) that the Psychological Contract is to be defined as a unilateral set of beliefs and expectations. Thus, the current project focuses exclusively on the subjective, intra-personal view on the Psychological Contract and aims to establish an understanding of the nature of Psychological Contracts among hotel employees in the region. The role of the Psychological Contract in employee retention has been recognized and received academic attention in recent years (Holland and Scullion 2021; Shanker Chaubey 2016; Snyman 2022; Tabassum and Ghosh 2023).
Research Purpose and Method
This study seeks answers to the following questions:
• What shared viewpoints exist among frontline hotel employees in Northern Germany about the employer inducements expected in their Psychological Contract?
• Which inducements are equally valued by employees?
• On the importance of which inducements do viewpoints differ?
• What demographic and workplace characteristics are associated with the different viewpoints?
We have adopted Q Methodology to enable us to determine the variety of viewpoints which may exist among different demographics and across the diverse landscape of workplaces. In this working paper we present the set of subjective statements reflecting expectations on employer inducements which may be formed by employees and potentially our initial findings from the Q sort. The statement concourse was accessed by reviewing 141 job postings published on a popular job search portal for hospitality professionals (Hotelcareer. 2023) in September 2023 as well as corporate career websites of hotel companies active in Northern Germany. Analysis revealed a concourse of explicitly and implicitly promised inducements from which 97 initial statements in 20 categories were derived. These were reduced to 49 statements in 13 themes, phrased from a first-person perspective. The statements will be employed in a Q Sort (Watts and Stenner 2012) to determine the relative importance of inducements to employees regarding their job satisfaction.
Conclusions and implications for practice
The overarching purpose of this study is to generate a basis on which practitioners can make informed decisions about strategies and tactics to improve their employees’ job satisfaction and increase staff retention. The findings will also provide a basis for further academic engagement with the topic and for improving our understanding of the mechanisms behind the labor shortage in this particular environment and help the search for a sustainable solution
Dissecting the molecular mechanisms of coronavirus genome packaging
No full textFor all viruses, specifically packaging their genome into progeny virions is crucially important for efficient transmission between hosts. This process must be tightly regulated to prevent spurious incorporation of defective viral genomes, subgenomic RNAs or host nucleic acids, resulting in non-infectious particles. Many viruses encode specific packaging signals (PS) which interact with viral structural proteins during particle assembly. While PSs have been identified in model coronaviruses from mouse and swine, genome packaging in human coronaviruses is still poorly understood.
We focussed our initial analyses on Mouse Hepatitis Virus (MHV), for which there is a characterised PS and mutant, and its close relative, human coronavirus OC43. Purified virions were subjected to high throughput RNA structure mapping, to establish the first high quality full-genome MHV and
OC43 RNA structures. Next, we performed cross-linking and immunoprecipitation of the viral structural proteins Membrane and Nucleocapsid. This allowed us to examine structural protein binding sites around the PS, as well as to identify other regions of the genome which are specifically bound. Concurrently, we developed both reverse genetics and transfection-based virus-like particle
systems for OC43; these allowed us to mutationally characterise the interactions between the structural proteins and the PS, to unpick the mechanism of genome packaging.
Together, our work provides an initial framework to understand the essential features of two coronavirus PSs. In the future, this will allow us to analyse more divergent coronaviruses to establish the fundamental principles of genome packaging family-wide
The power of peer mentoring in the survivor's healing process
No full textUnderstanding what peer mentoring is and its benefits. Addressing the gaps in survivors' service provision and evidence of peer mentoring and the positive impact on victims and survivors.
This presentation represents the doctoral research undertaken by Dr Beverley Gilbert, along with her own practice in the VCSE sector supporting women surviving abuse and trauma
Microscale Pollen Release and Dispersal Patterns in Flowering Grass Populations: Exploring eDNA and Isolated Festuca rubra Flowering in a Rural Landscape Setting
No full textOral Presentation 3
Revisiting Lord Mance’s dissent in R (Bancoult) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (No.2) in the 800th year of Magna Carta
No full textHeroic Handicrafts: Covert Weapons of War
No full textForget the cliché of women making-do-and-mending quietly at home while men were away on the fighting front. Handicrafts, in fact, became ingenious tools of espionage, morale, sabotage, and propaganda during the Second World War. Esther uncovers the hidden tales of how women used domestic craft skills to assemble spy disguises for SOE operatives, smuggle secrets, and turn needlecraft into a covert weapon of war. Her fascinating talk blends life history with social history, using a wide variety of primary sources to tell a hitherto unsung story of the war effort