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Employee wellbeing is a crucial challenge in many organisations in South Africa and abroad. Interventions at a management level are vital to ensure that organisations do not lose quality employees due to poor employee well-being. Therefore, the paper assessed the strategies that can be used to enhance the well-being of academics in an institution of higher learning in South Africa. The paper employed a qualitative approach to collect data from the Management Committee (MANCO) at the Durban University of Technology in Durban, South Africa. Purposive sampling was be used to collect data directly from the MANCO. All data are analyzed using Nvivo. Findings from the study revealed that leadership plays a pivotal role in the well-being of employees. The findings of the paper can assist the management of the university with solutions related to the turnover of academics and will also be a wake-up call to other universities on the subject matter.

Graduate education plays a role in improving the scope for employability of graduates. It empowers them with specialized skills, advanced knowledge, and critical thinking, which increases the scope for their employability. However, in the case of Saudi Arabia, it has been reported that there is widespread unemployment in the country. Though the Saudi Arabian government has initiated measures to nurture development in education through their ‘Saudi Vision 2030’ program, a gap exists. There are strong indictors which point at a mismatch of knowledge and skills possessed by graduates in Saudi, and the requirements of the labour market. Therefore, this paper examines the apparent gap between academia and employers in terms of employability, while focusing on whether graduate students have the same set of skills that employers require. Using a review method, information was derived from secondary sources, mainly from papers having examined the same topic previously. From the findings, academia believed that the educational system needed an overhaul and economic diversification, with the creation of new employment opportunities. Though employers believed that Saudi graduates lacked soft skills impacting their employability. It was concluded that a collaboration between students and employers was required, where employers could offer inputs supporting graduate employability.

Entrepreneurship has increasingly captured policymaker’s attention due to the need to promote economic development and job creation. Among the drivers of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial education is of particular significance. This paper reviews entrepreneurship education from a research and practice perspective. Firstly, a discussion is held as to whether entrepreneurial talent is born or bred. Secondly, the different approaches to entrepreneurship education are revised, specifying their distinctive characteristics. This is followed by a review of research on the potential of entrepreneurship education to awaken individuals’ entrepreneurial intentions. Finally, a series of practical considerations aimed at improving entrepreneurship education programs are proposed. Ultimately, this paper contextualizes entrepreneurship education, advocating its relevance in the promotion of entrepreneurial activity.

This paper discusses an Academic Service Learning (ASL) approach as a teaching method to combine meaningful service to the community and core academic requirements for learning accounting. The Academic Service-Learning approach offers an opportunity for the students to enhance what they are learning in the classroom and combine it with the benefit of providing a service to the community. This study shows how service learning offers a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between academic accounting core curriculum requirements and the need of society to have individuals willing to give their time and effort to benefit others in need. This article aims to understand the benefits of High-Impact practices (HIPs) for students in the classroom, particularly, using Academic Service-Learning as a pedagogical tool. The goal is to understand the benefits of using a Service-Learning approach to teach accounting. As part of the course learning requirement, students engaged in a project whereby a not-for-profit organization's income statement was forecasted and evaluated using a vertical analysis. A post-survey was administered, which focused on how the Service-Learning project helped the students connect what they were learning in class with the actual accounting practice meaningfully.

The need to integrate competences aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into higher education curricula has gained considerable attention in recent years. While the literature shows an increase in research on this topic, there remains a scarcity of papers addressing effective strategies to foster students' environmental sustainability competencies and skills, through active pedagogical methods. A promising avenue to achieve this goal is the adoption of the Flipped Classroom methodology. This approach has proven its ability to guide students towards reflection and critical thinking, making it a good tool for promoting sustainability awareness. An experience of educational innovation is presented that develops SDG 12 "Guarantee sustainable consumption and production patterns", and SDG 9 "Industry, innovation and infrastructures", in the subject Production Management, with the aim of achieving the competence "environmental awareness". From the perspective of the students, an evaluation of the educational experience is presented. The results show the success of the Flipped Classroom methodology in providing students with a holistic understanding of the principles of sustainable development and their application through the SDGs within their academic trajectory. In particular, this approach provides them with the skills and aptitudes to promote sustainability.

This paper analyses the level of knowledge and engagement of the students of the Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration and Management (GADE) of the Faculty of Economics and Business (Gipuzkoa Section) of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) on the SDGs using Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis. This analysis makes it possible to identify different patterns or profiles of student behavior in relation to sustainability. The results show the coexistence of four different patterns of behavior in relation to knowledge, perception, and commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and sustainability among students. We identify a first group comprising 23.4% of students with low knowledge and high commitment to the SDGs; a second group that includes 30.4% of students with high knowledge of and commitment to the SDGs; a third group comprising 30% of students with low knowledge of and commitment to the SDGs; and finally, a fourth group comprising 16.2% of students with high knowledge of and low commitment to the SDGs. This scenario suggests the necessity to make further progress in the incorporation of the sustainable development dimension in the teaching-learning processes.

In this paper we introduce an innovation activity which consists of a writing competition in a Faculty of Economics and Business at a large university in Spain. This activity allows us to assess the deficiencies that higher education students have in writing reports and to encourage students and staff to be aware of the relevance of written communication for their personal lives and their professional careers. This experience showed us that those students that enrolled in the competition had good marks in a multiple-choice exam with questions about orthography, grammar, punctuation and vocabulary but they found more difficulties in composing their own texts. This suggests that despite the years employed in learning the Spanish language prior to embarking on their higher education courses, the students do not have enough skills to compose texts at the advanced level that corresponds to professionals in Social Sciences. One implication of these findings is that higher education teachers should highlight the relevance of writing properly to their students and develop activities in those fields in which composition is compulsory.

Responsible leadership training requires development of individuals who are both knowledgeable and emotionally mature so that they can overcome personal biases to make honest and ethical decisions that have a positive social impact within and outside the organization. Current MBA class exercises use a few trait-based surveys and basic techniques to manage one’s emotions along with leadership definitions that can be misinterpreted by students to be devoid of liable behaviors. Consequently, the problem of self-misconception persists with no change in students’ reasoning about the core problem that is causing their emotionally charged decision. Hence, most students fail to sustain their emotional management processes. To address this need to recognize and correct one’s self-misconceptions to uphold emotional maturity, our specific course of action is to address it holistically based on a preexisting Upanishadic model. The primary contribution of this paper is to bring to the forefront a practical, and useable model that can provide clear steps to refine one’s habitual orientations caused by self-misconceptions. We present the causal mechanism underlying the cognitive-emotional mechanisms wherein the core constructs are Knowing, Active and Inert qualities along six behavior influencing areas which elicit three distinct groups of emotions resulting in consequent decisions. Using a short case scenario-based exercise, we put forth steps students can take to develop responsible leadership qualities. Implications in the form of less stressful and happier workplaces are briefly discussed. A new definition of leadership is presented that helps one distinguish true leadership from notorious ones. The model and the accompanying steps help MBA students develop into fair, thoughtful, knowledgeable, compassionate, and truthful leaders, who work for the benefit of the entire society.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the strategies for retention and completion in vocational education. We are reporting on one New Zealand polytechnic institution’s experience in improving the retention and completion rate for a one-year diploma in business programme. A review of relevant literature pertaining to retention and completion strategies in tertiary education in general and for vocational education in particular was performed to understand the factors dominant in dropout decisions of tertiary students and to explore retention and completion strategies from a wider body of knowledge. The review focused on strategies influencing institutional and interactive factors to identify this issue. Further, a qualitative study was conducted; data was collected by conducting one-on-one interviews using open-ended questions to survey the faculty teaching on the diploma programme at a New Zealand polytechnic. The findings revealed faculty employed a range of practices for improving interaction with students, identifying at-risk students, and providing them with support, creating a collaborative learning environment, and employing a constructive feedback system to improve retention and completion in the programme. This study is expected to assist educators and tertiary institutions in prioritising retention and completion issues and adopting suitable strategies to address these issues.

Teaching at university level has evolved in recent years towards teaching methodologies in which the student has an increasingly active role in their learning, being the protagonist together with the teaching staff. The use of techniques in which students put into practice and reflect on the theoretical contents has benefits both for the acquisition of knowledge and for the development of competences. In the field of business administration, business reality is a continuous source of information for putting this type of methodology into practice. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to achieve, through the case method, that the students of the subject " Organizational Structure and Behavior" of the degree in Business Administration and Management assimilate, understand and put into practice the concepts acquired in the theoretical classes, favoring autonomous learning, cooperative learning, dialogue and peer learning. Specifically, lectures have been replaced by a set of individual and group activities around a business case study designed by the teaching staff. The use of the case method has been adequate to achieve the objectives set at the beginning of the activity. Students have expressed a high satisfaction with the learning process, a higher perceived quality of learning, and increase of digital competences and an improvement of the evaluation processes. In addition, this methodology has increased their interest in the subject and its contents and has improved their autonomy in the learning process.

This research delves into Twitter analysis, a well-known social media messaging service recently acquired by Elon Musk for $44bn, which we argue to enable researchers to better monitor (and try to solve) the status of the general population regarding the type of user and content of the received messages. With this analysis, it is intended to show the possibility of disseminating reliable, immediate, and high-quality messages (that would be unlikely obtained through official information channels), potentially provoking in this way an exponential impact afterwards. This idea in particular is key, due to any average social media population user and especially from 'Gen Z' (which hold 25% lower attention capacity and 40% lower check of the reliability of sources than its predecessor generation) could easily understand wrongly the massive (and unfiltered) amounts of information received, therefore generating false alarms, beliefs and in some cases, even own welfare losses. To do so, along this paper we propose the development of a pedagogical activity with a multi-methodological approach through which to carry out a qualitative (and cross-sectional) analysis in the degree of ‘Business Administration and Management’ of EDEM-Business School. Thus, the aforementioned activity would constitute a successful teaching innovation exercise as regards to the acquisition of the required competencies and learning outcomes established within the course, as well as to the achievement of a (attainable and consensual) solution to a real problem faced nowadays and selected by the students: in this case, the increase of awareness about the cervical cancer, a type of cancer that is currently the fourth most common among women worldwide and one of the easiest to prevent through screening tests.

Student Entrepreneurship Societies (SES) are bottom-up organizations, led and developed by university students to promote entrepreneurship and innovation practices. This paper reports results of research aimed to survey the Brazilian SES, characterizing their main activities, challenges, supporters, and how SES are impacting startup creation and the development of entrepreneurship skills among students. We identified the Brazilian SES, applied two questionnaires to gather information about the SES and interviewed some SES leaders. We found 92 SES in Brazil. Only 3,7% of the 2608 Brazilian Universities were linked to a SES, and the 940 students directly involved in SES represent only 0,01% of the 8.03 million Brazilian university students. In the UK such proportion is considerably higher - 1,2%. SES members study Canvas Business Model, pitch, MVP, Design Thinking and Lean Startup; they promote talks, workshops, networking events, hackathons, and business plan competitions. They develop practical projects essentially in all areas and receive support from professors, entrepreneurs, startups, investors and other agents of the ecosystem. Although SES leaders have reported participation and/or support in the creation of 24 startups, only 8 (28,57% from 28 respondent SES) had records on startup creation. Through involvement in SES, the student’s education is enriched by theory and practice, networking, and influence from professors, entrepreneurs, startup communities and other students. The positive impact of SES on a student’s professional development should motivate policy makers, startup communities, investors and universities to consider increasing support to SES. New research should be conducted to shed light on the impact of SES for the creation of new businesses.

The learning process at the university demands more and more active participation from students and a greater approximation to the reality that is the object of learning. In the case of creation of companies and entrepreneurship courses, it is common for teaching to be actively organized around the development of a business plan (project-based learning) developed in a group (cooperative learning). However, in many cases, the communication dimension of the business plan, an essential task in any process of setting up a business, is not worked or it is limited to the presentation of the project to be evaluated by lecturers. In this context, this paper presents two internationalization actions developed in entrepreneurship courses with the objective of teaching how to communicate a business project, all of them with an international scope. Furthermore, the initiative objectives include the improvement of students' communication skills and competences, increase their participation in learning and evaluation processes, and facilitate them a multicultural vision of entrepreneurship provided by lecturers from other universities. The results have shown a greater involvement of the students, not only in the task of communicating their business project, but also in the interest, attention and feedback provided to the business plans of their peers, thus increasing learning through this cooperation. In addition, the participation of international lecturers has been an incentive to students to improve their communication actions.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the strategies for retention and completion in vocational education. We are reporting on one New Zealand polytechnic institution’s experience in improving the retention and completion rate for a one-year diploma in business programme. A review of relevant literature pertaining to retention and completion strategies in tertiary education in general and for vocational education in particular was performed to understand the factors dominant in dropout decisions of tertiary students and to explore retention and completion strategies from a wider body of knowledge. The review focused on strategies influencing institutional and interactive factors to identify this issue. Further, a qualitative study was conducted; data was collected by conducting one-on-one interviews using open-ended questions to survey the faculty teaching on the diploma programme at a New Zealand polytechnic. The findings revealed faculty employed a range of practices for improving interaction with students, identifying at-risk students, and providing them with support, creating a collaborative learning environment, and employing a constructive feedback system to improve retention and completion in the programme. This study is expected to assist educators and tertiary institutions in prioritising retention and completion issues and adopting suitable strategies to address these issues.

Teaching at university level has evolved in recent years towards teaching methodologies in which the student has an increasingly active role in their learning, being the protagonist together with the teaching staff. The use of techniques in which students put into practice and reflect on the theoretical contents has benefits both for the acquisition of knowledge and for the development of competences. In the field of business administration, business reality is a continuous source of information for putting this type of methodology into practice. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to achieve, through the case method, that the students of the subject " Organizational Structure and Behavior" of the degree in Business Administration and Management assimilate, understand and put into practice the concepts acquired in the theoretical classes, favoring autonomous learning, cooperative learning, dialogue and peer learning. Specifically, lectures have been replaced by a set of individual and group activities around a business case study designed by the teaching staff. The use of the case method has been adequate to achieve the objectives set at the beginning of the activity. Students have expressed a high satisfaction with the learning process, a higher perceived quality of learning, and increase of digital competences and an improvement of the evaluation processes. In addition, this methodology has increased their interest in the subject and its contents and has improved their autonomy in the learning process.

The paper presents an in-class case exercise that aims to help students learn how to apply ethical values in their personal and professional lives. Development of ethical values are often stated in a very simple way and seem easy to apply to objective situations in an ethical course. However, when it comes to having students apply it in their lives, there seems to be a disconnect, due to a level of unawareness of one’s own actions. The exercise is thus designed to help students gain self-awareness of personal practices in different contexts. The exercise will help students develop individual ethical values in each of those contexts especially if their personal practices seem inadequate in helping them achieve their desires. While the immediate audience includes undergraduate and graduate students, it would be a valuable self-exploratory tool to use in any workplace setting to train employees.

We’ll argument in this paper that the area of undergraduate studies that we can consider as belonging to the great area of the communication sciences and, in particular, those areas that have as one of their purposes also the professional training in Corporate Communications / Public Relations, seem to be navigating in a blurriness of both theoretical constructs and purposes, as well as a lack of public recognition. Moreover, it will be argued that the main purpose underlying all definitions should be the old idea from the Enlightenment that the mission of undergraduate studies is, before and above all, the shaping of rational and responsible citizens.

Global competition and digital market forces imply opportunities and threats in an increasingly fast and competitive job market. In this context, motivated learning through collaboration or cooperation have been extensively studied to develop necessary skills to be competitive. However, in undergraduate teaching little attention has been given to learning through competition and co-opetition, which is more common in entrepreneurial education. This paper proposes and tests a new classroom methodology where undergraduate students in the course Microeconomics interact in teams playing out features of the four C’s of game-based learning in an entrepreneurial environment: cooperation, collaboration, competition and co-opetition. The pedagogical pilot-project, dubbed as “Micro-Challenge”, is a peer-based student challenge which has been implemented in face-to-face classes as well as in a hybrid classroom. A posterior analysis of survey data and academic results, using regression analysis, reveals that the development of collaborative skills and team-based skills depend on personal characteristics and expertise while there is no significant effect of academic performance. Moreover, women are more likely to improve team-working or collaborative skills through the proposed challenge than men and engagement in terms of induced learning effect is found to be higher for students who are already endowed with a high level of competitive or collaborative attitude.

The ‘rule of 72’ provides a useful approximation of when an investment or debt will double. Students can apply it for an estimate, avoiding mistakes later using technology for a precise answer. On standardized tests, moreover, such devices may be disallowed. In job interviews, too, quickly approximating the doubling answer demonstrates impressive problem-solving ability. Illustrations abound online and in traditional media showing how to use it. This is not the same as explaining why it works or the limitations. Inquiring students want to know. This paper combines familiar territories in math and application to provide a relatively simple mathematical explanation.

The research utilized a survey research method, with a research instrument developed from relevant extant literature, to isolate the major factors determining students’ choice behavior towards MBA programs in the Nigerian university system. The research reports that the major factors determining students’ choice behavior towards MBA programs include quality-related, information-related, and convenience-related factors. The limitations associated with the research relate to its cross-sectional nature, in addition to the usual limitations associated with the survey research method used in this research. In addition, the combination of MBA students from both private and government-owned universities is likely to pose some limitations. Also, focusing on students from only one country (Nigeria) presents external validity limitations. The research has practical implications for administrators and regulators of business programs in the Nigerian university system, in addition to organizational decision-makers interested in sponsoring their relevant staff for MBA programs in the Nigerian university system. The research has social implications with regard to the different cohorts of students interested in MBA programs in the Nigerian university system. With regard to value, the paper has theoretical and practical forms of values for students and organizational decision makers, in addition to educational managers and regulators in the Nigerian university system.

Soft skills are regarded as combination of social, emotional, communication and personal skills which promotes workplace effectiveness regardless of qualifications or knowledge acquired. This paper linked soft skills to business education teachers’ job effectiveness. Three research questions guided the study. The study population includes all the secondary schools principals, Vice-principals, Head of Departments and students that offers business education related subjects in in Ilorin Metropolis. Random sampling and stratified techniques were used to select 316 participants. We used adapted structured questionnaires tagged “Teachers’ Soft Skills Questionnaire (TSSQ)” and Business Education Teachers’ Job Effectiveness Questionnaire (BETJEQ). We used descriptive statistics to answer the research questions and Pearson Products Moment Correlation (PPMC) to test hypotheses. We found the level of business education teachers’ soft skills and their job effectiveness to be high at 70.6% & 64.6 %. Also, the result revealed a strong, positive linkage between the two variables, r = 0.866, n = 316, p < .000. By implication, Soft Skills will promote teachers’ job effectively positively. That is, the higher the soft skills in the teachers, the better their effectiveness. Therefore, we recommended for practice based on the findings that special training inform of workshop should be organised for Business education teachers on regular basis by government in collaboration with professional bodies to promote up-to-date soft skills that are transferable and promotes teaching effectiveness.