The career experiences of industrial and organisational psychology graduates

A survey of 53 graduates of industrial and organizational psychology masters programs, from the four universities in New Zealand offering such programs (Auckland, Canterbury, Massey, Waikato), was conducted to explore their early career experiences. The survey confirms that industrial and organizational psychology graduates are reasonably successful in establishing careers within the discipline with most graduates working in related fields. Recommendations for students pursuing careers and universities offering such programs are suggested. The information derived from this study is potentially of benefit to future graduates and others who may be considering a career in the field of industrial and organizational psychology, and to the convenors of the respective university programs

Answering the Calls of "What's Next" and "Library Workers Cannot Live by Love Alone" through Certification and Salary Research

Members and staff of the American Library Association (ALA) worked diligently over more than a decade to develop a certification program for public library managers. Spurred by a long-standing trend in many other terminal-degree professions that have post-degree, voluntary certifications, the Certified Public Library Administrator Program was born. Legal authority recommended the establishment of a service organization, a 501(c)(6) to manage the program, which has become one of several programs that will be offered to library employees under the imprimatur of ALA. After the American Library Association???Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA) was instituted, advocacy for salary improvement initiatives was appended to the mission. One means of salary advocacy was to improve available data by expanding the scope and usefulness of the ALA Survey of Librarian Salaries, which resulted in the ALA-APA Salary Survey: Non-MLS???Public and Academic, conducted in 2006 and 2007 to collect salary data from more than sixty positions in the field that do not require a master's degree in Library Science. The experience of establishing two certification programs, the Certified Public Library Administrator Program (CPLA??) and the Library Support Staff Certification Program, has been a study in creating new national models of professional development. This article will also discuss the insights that have emerged from fulfilling elements of ALA strategic plans concerning the needs of support staff through certification and the salary survey.published or submitted for publicatio

A Case Study Exploring Organizational Development and Performance Management in the Operational Infrastructure of a Professional Working Organization, Using Academic Constructs

Curriculum, as a concept, has been historically associated with traditional schooling, but the reality is that its application extends to many arenas beyond academia. Through the case study lens, this dissertation utilized the ideologies of curricular theorists John Dewey, John Franklin Bobbitt, and Ralph Tyler to explore how intended, enacted, and assessed curricula phases can integrate into a professional working organization’s comprehensive functionality and materialize into the planning and implementation of its operational infrastructure. Following content analysis of a selected institution’s operational system, using closed codes, a descriptive comprehensive curriculum was designed to address the research purpose of understanding employee performance and organizational outcomes. Findings indicated that curricular phases are inherently embedded into the organizational development and performance management of nonacademic spaces; moreover, the framework of an organization’s operational infrastructure consists largely of curriculum elements. The primary research implication invokes being able to manage the efficiency and effectiveness levels of (a) personnel unit performance and (b) the workplace environment, through curriculum analysis and prescription

Policing the Arctic: The North Slope of Alaska

An abbreviated version of this paper, which excluded the NSBDPS employee survey results, was published as: Trostle, Lawrence C.; & Angell, John E. (1994). "Policing the Arctic: The North Slope of Alaska." Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 10(2): 95–108 (May 1994). (http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/104398629401000203). A related report with employee comments from the survey concerning Public Safety Officer (PSO) assignment lengths and rotation policies is available at https://scholarworks.alaska.edu/handle/11122/10007.Geographic size and lack of roads, among other factors, contribute to unique difficulties in providing effective law enforcement and public safety services to residents of the North Slope Borough of Alaska. Despite comprehensive plans laid in the mid-1970s, the North Slope Borough has not been successful in implementing a broad, multicultural community public safety organizational design. The more traditional professional law enforcement agency which has evolved is perceived by some people as having community and employee relations problems. This paper provides a brief history of law enforcement on the North Slope and presents selected data from a 1993 survey of employees of the North Slope Borough Department of Public Safety (NSBDPS). The data support a hypothesis that indigenous personnel with strong roots in a minority community will be more committed to the community police organization than would be employees without such roots.North Slope Borough Department of Public SafetyIntroduction / Traditional Justice Administration / Government / Department of Public Safety / North Slope Department of Public Safety Goals / Research Support for a Multicultural Community Social Control Operation / Conclusion / Reference

A Qualitative Study of Perceived Risk for HIV Transmission among Police Officers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Understanding people's views about HIV transmission by investigating a specific population may help to design effective HIV prevention strategies. In addition, knowing the inherent sexual practices of such a population, as well as the risky circumstances that may facilitate HIV transmission, is crucial for the said strategies to become effective. In this article, we report how police officers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, perceived the problem of HIV and AIDS in their local context, particularly in relation to unsafe sexual practices. The study was done with the view to recommending ways by which HIV transmission could be minimised within the police force. The study was conducted among members of the police force in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Eight focus group discussions (FGDs) were conducted, with a total of 66 participants who were mixed in terms of age, gender, and marital status. Some of these were caregivers to patients with AIDS. Data were analysed using the interpretive description approach. The participants believed that both individual sexual behaviour and work-related circumstances were sources of HIV infection. They also admitted that they were being tempted to engage in risky sexual practices because of the institutional rules that prohibit officers from getting married during their training and for three years after. Nevertheless, as members of the Police Force, they stressed the fact that the risky sexual behaviour that exposes them to HIV is not limited to the force; it is rather a common problem that is faced by the general population. However, they complained, the nature of their job exposes them to road accident victims, subjecting them further to possible infection, especially when they have to handle these road accident casualties without proper protective gear. Individual sexual behaviour and job-related circumstances are worth investigating if proper advice is to be given to the police regarding HIV prevention strategies. In order to improve the lives of these police officers, there is a need to review the existing institutional rules and practices to accommodate individual sexual needs. In addition, improving their working environment may minimize the risk of HIV transmission from handling casualties in emergency situations

Employment relations in Chile : evidence of HRM practices

This paper presents empirical evidence about HRM practices in Chilean organisations with the aims of providing an overview of employment relations and adding to limited existing literature. Research was conducted in a sample of 2000 Chilean workers in the Metropolitan Region. The paper argues that HRM practices in Chilean organisations illustrate the normative perspective of modern HRM discourse, where managers understand the nature of employment relationships to be the control of workers. While HRM processes are articulated under a discourse of worker emancipation, in reality, discursive practices perpetuate patterns of subordination that have historically shaped employment relations in Chile

ONTOLOGY BASED TECHNICAL SKILL SIMILARITY

Online job boards have become a major platform for technical talent procurement and job search. These job portals have given rise to challenging matching and search problems. The core matching or search happens between technical skills of the job requirements and the candidate\u27s profile or keywords. The extensive list of technical skills and its polyonymous nature makes it less effective to perform a direct keyword matching. This results in substandard job matching or search results which misses out a closely matching candidate on account of it not having the exact skills. It is important to use a semantic similarity measure between skills to improve the relevance of the results. This paper proposes a semantic similarity measure between technical skills using a knowledge based approach. The approach builds an ontology using DBpedia and uses it to derive a similarity score. Feature based ontology similarity measures are used to derive a similarity score between two skills. The ontology also helps in resolving a base skill from its multiple representations. The paper discusses implementation of custom ontology, similarity measuring system and performance of the system in comparing technical skills. The proposed approach performs better than the Resumatcher system in finding the similarity between skills. Keywords

Knowledge aggregation in people recommender systems : matching skills to tasks

People recommender systems (PRS) are a special type of RS. They are often adopted to identify people capable of performing a task. Recommending people poses several challenges not exhibited in traditional RS. Elements such as availability, overload, unresponsiveness, and bad recommendations can have adverse effects. This thesis explores how people’s preferences can be elicited for single-event matchmaking under uncertainty and how to align them with appropriate tasks. Different methodologies are introduced to profile people, each based on the nature of the information from which it was obtained. These methodologies are developed into three use cases to illustrate the challenges of PRS and the steps taken to address them. Each one emphasizes the priorities of the matching process and the constraints under which these recommendations are made. First, multi-criteria profiles are derived completely from heterogeneous sources in an implicit manner characterizing users from multiple perspectives and multi-dimensional points-of-view without influence from the user. The profiles are introduced to the conference reviewer assignment problem. Attention is given to distribute people across items in order reduce potential overloading of a person, and neglect or rejection of a task. Second, people’s areas of interest are inferred from their resumes and expressed in terms of their uncertainty avoiding explicit elicitation from an individual or outsider. The profile is applied to a personnel selection problem where emphasis is placed on the preferences of the candidate leading to an asymmetric matching process. Third, profiles are created by integrating implicit information and explicitly stated attributes. A model is developed to classify citizens according to their lifestyles which maintains the original information in the data set throughout the cluster formation. These use cases serve as pilot tests for generalization to real-life implementations. Areas for future application are discussed from new perspectives.Els sistemes de recomanació de persones (PRS) són un tipus especial de sistemes recomanadors (RS). Sovint s’utilitzen per identificar persones per a realitzar una tasca. La recomanació de persones comporta diversos reptes no exposats en la RS tradicional. Elements com la disponibilitat, la sobrecàrrega, la falta de resposta i les recomanacions incorrectes poden tenir efectes adversos. En aquesta tesi s'explora com es poden obtenir les preferències dels usuaris per a la definició d'assignacions sota incertesa i com aquestes assignacions es poden alinear amb tasques definides. S'introdueixen diferents metodologies per definir el perfil d’usuaris, cadascun en funció de la naturalesa de la informació necessària. Aquestes metodologies es desenvolupen i s’apliquen en tres casos d’ús per il·lustrar els reptes dels PRS i els passos realitzats per abordar-los. Cadascun destaca les prioritats del procés, l’encaix de les recomanacions i les seves limitacions. En el primer cas, els perfils es deriven de variables heterogènies de manera implícita per tal de caracteritzar als usuaris des de múltiples perspectives i punts de vista multidimensionals sense la influència explícita de l’usuari. Això s’aplica al problema d'assignació d’avaluadors per a articles de conferències. Es presta especial atenció al fet de distribuir els avaluadors entre articles per tal de reduir la sobrecàrrega potencial d'una persona i el neguit o el rebuig a la tasca. En el segon cas, les àrees d’interès per a caracteritzar les persones es dedueixen dels seus currículums i s’expressen en termes d’incertesa evitant que els interessos es demanin explícitament a les persones. El sistema s'aplica a un problema de selecció de personal on es posa èmfasi en les preferències del candidat que condueixen a un procés d’encaix asimètric. En el tercer cas, els perfils dels usuaris es defineixen integrant informació implícita i atributs indicats explícitament. Es desenvolupa un model per classificar els ciutadans segons els seus estils de vida que manté la informació original del conjunt de dades del clúster al que ell pertany. Finalment, s’analitzen aquests casos com a proves pilot per generalitzar implementacions en futurs casos reals. Es discuteixen les àrees d'aplicació futures i noves perspectives.Postprint (published version