Sustaining the Promise: Realizing the Potential of Workforce Intermediaries and Sector Projects

Reviews the outcomes of sector-specific workforce development projects run by intermediaries with a comprehensive, long-term approach. Outlines the challenges of and recommendations for securing sustainability in financing, infrastructure, and operations

GTTC Future of Ground Testing Meta-Analysis of 20 Documents

National research, development, test, and evaluation ground testing capabilities in the United States are at risk. There is a lack of vision and consensus on what is and will be needed, contributing to a significant threat that ground test capabilities may not be able to meet the national security and industrial needs of the future. To support future decisions, the AIAA Ground Testing Technical Committees (GTTC) Future of Ground Test (FoGT) Working Group selected and reviewed 20 seminal documents related to the application and direction of ground testing. Each document was reviewed, with the content main points collected and organized into sections in the form of a gap analysis current state, future state, major challenges/gaps, and recommendations. This paper includes key findings and selected commentary by an editing team

Skills shortages and training in Russian enterprises

In the transition to a market economy, the Russian workforce underwent a wrenching period of change, with excess supply of some industrial skills coexisting with reports of skills shortages by many enterprises. This paper uses data from the Russia Competitiveness and Investment Climate Survey and related local research to gain insight into the changing supply and demand for skills over time, and the potential reasons for reported staffing problems and skills shortages, including labor turnover, compensation policies, and the inhibiting effects of labor regulations. It discusses in-service training as an enterprise strategy for meeting staffing and skills needs, and presents evidence on the distribution, intensity, and determinants of in-service training in Russia. It investigates the productivity and wage outcomes of in-service training, and the supportive role of training in firms'research and development and innovative activities. A final section concludes with some policy implications of the findings.Education For All,Access&Equity in Basic Education,Labor Markets,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning

An examination of Rand Water's skills development for the production of quality drinking water locally

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Engineering an the built environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Engineering. Johannesburg, October 2016.The study investigates the effectiveness of Rand Water’s Scientific Services’ skills development strategy for the assurance of quality drinking water as prescribed by the SANS 0241 National Drinking Water Quality Standard. The aim is to establish whether: 1) the present skills are adequate to provide the scientific data required for affirming drinking water quality and 2) the skills development taking place in the Scientific Services division is adequate for the level and quantity of scientific skills required for the future. There is also some discussion to understand the motivation for maintaining and increasing skills within the Scientific Services division for Rand Water. Assuring drinking water quality within Rand Water is the sole responsibility of the Scientific Services division. The division provides regular routine and non-routine drinking water quality monitoring, testing, data collection, analyses and reporting on the organisation’s performance against the SANS 0241 Drinking Water Quality Standards (SANS, 2006).The focus of the analysis is Scientific Services Division in Rand Water, although the discussion in view of the topic is not limited to the division. Production of drinking water encompasses two key aspects that must be investigated they are quality and quantity, however the close up analyses could only be successful completed for quality in the context of the quantity produced. Skills development planning within Scientific Services has always been based on the division’s feeder pipelines to be able to recruit from and retain scientific skills within the organisation. The division concentrates on Graduate, Bursar and Experiential Learner development ensuring a sustainable, trained and readily available pipeline of skills from which to recruit. Employees currently within the division both permanent and temporary form the type of scientific skills required for water quality monitoring and drinking water standard production and assurance. Employees have been placed within the functional scientific streams of the division and further by their levels of appointment and qualifications. The data analysis has also been done for the increasing of skills using the same framework. Age and gender was also included to show performance of the division in respect to transformation and equity. Equity in relation to growth is currently a global matter that is under scrutiny. The World Economic Forum has put equity in the spotlight to ensure countries look at their performance. The significance is that it has an impact on how the water resources in a country are distributed and managed. The Water Reforms in most developing countries have sparked large scale discussions around provisioning of water for all. Human Development and Water Resource Management are agendas that countries need to handle collectively with the ultimate outcome being achieving equity for all (UNDP, 2013). Rand Water’s Scientific Service skills data indicates that it has adequate scientific capacity to meet its present mandate of providing drinking water quality assurance for the organisation. There is some concern that the aging workforce is concentrated at management and specialists levels, therefore developing these skills for the next 5 to 10 years requires immediate attention. Transfer of skills and retention of skills requires careful strategic planning in order to attract a younger transformed workforce. The study shows that in as much as routine quality assurance is core, it is also equally critical to have employees who can troubleshoot within the context of the new environmental pressures and diverse operational conditions. The demand for quality drinking water over the last 110 years has increased throughout the country. The mandatory expansion of the organisation translates into sharing of human resources with other parts of the country to produce quality drinking water. Rand Water has been entrusted to take on the responsibility of other water utilities in the country and ensure that they reach the required standard for the production of quality drinking water. The full scope of the organisation’s mandate requires that it provide skills to handle the treatment of drinking water and wastewater in the near future. Although wastewater treatment is currently managed by the local municipalities, Rand Water will be having an active role to improve services. This would mean distributing the existing capacity within the organisation over a greater area of work along with a significant increase in the demand for scientific analyses of drinking water quality. The pace at which skills development takes place in Rand Water Scientific Services division shows that it will be able to meet the present needs. There are questions raised on the sustainability of the skills for the future. Maintaining and developing skills within the division is critical to be able to sustain the nature, structure and functioning of the division in its current form. The other factor that must also be maintained is the transformational equity demands of the country. The notion that there is a lack of experienced previously disadvantages scientists must be addressed directly to meet all the future demands of the sector, region and continent in a short space of time.MT201

Resource Planning in Engineering Services Firms

We develop a model to enable engineering professional services firms to improve the management of their competitive resources, i.e., skilled engineers, to be better able to respond to customer demand. The model was informed by semistructured interviews with senior executives from engineering, information technology (IT) services and technical consulting firms. As a result, we capture many of the complexities associated with the resource planning process in the professional engineering services sector. In the resulting model, the key attributes of supply, demand, and operations constraints are identified. Based on information obtained from the interviews, a number of test firms are created.We then use these test firms to study the impact of various resource planning policies on firm performance. These policies include the skill mix and profile of skilled employees, limits on the number of concurrent projects to which an employee can be assigned, and policies governing employee cross-training and hiring. The impact of these policies is evaluated in terms of business metrics, such as the project completion rate and net revenue. Finally, our model is extended to capture a multiphase rolling planning horizon, where projects may span multiple phases with the goal of ensuring consistency in employee assignment to projects

Managing at the Speed of Light: Improving Mission-Support Performance

The House and Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittees requested this study to help DOE's three major mission-support organizations improve their operations to better meet the current and future needs of the department. The passage of the Recovery Act only increased the importance of having DOE's mission-support offices working in the most effective, efficient, and timely manner as possible. While following rules and regulations is essential, the foremost task of the mission-support offices is to support the department's mission, i.e., the programs that DOE is implementing, whether in Washington D.C. or in the field. As a result, the Panel offered specific recommendations to strengthen the mission-focus and improve the management of each of the following support functions based on five "management mandates":- Strategic Vision- Leadership- Mission and Customer Service Orientation- Tactical Implementation- Agility/AdaptabilityKey FindingsThe Panel made several recommendations in each of the functional areas examined and some overarching recommendations for the corporate management of the mission-support offices that they believed would result in significant improvements to DOE's mission-support operations. The Panel believed that adopting these recommendations will not only make DOE a better functioning organization, but that most of them are essential if DOE is to put its very large allocation of Recovery Act funding to its intended uses as quickly as possible