Search Results (5)

This paper presents my personal experiences of cross-disciplinary national and international academic mentoring over 30 years in a higher education setting, supporting 605 mentees in public health, health education, and the health services. I supported mentees at diverse career stages through (a) one-to-one mentoring relationships (n = 231 mentees; from the UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australasia; academics, industry, and healthcare professionals), (b) a cross-faculty structured mentoring programme (n = 52; junior faculty), (c) a cross-institutional interprofessional internship programme including mentoring and public health placements (n = 302 interns; from five universities), and (d) an interprofessional learning programme in workplace health called WHIRL, which was embedded within Test@Work, a public health innovation bridging health promotion practice, research, and industry and involving peer mentoring and mentor support (n = 20; volunteer healthcare trainees). In this paper, I outline the broader concept of mentoring, together with an overview of mentoring types, uses, and benefits. The diverse contexts in which mentoring occurs are discussed: (i) micro-mentoring, (ii) inducting new staff, (iii) peer mentoring, (iv) career transition moments, (v) career advancement mentoring, (vi) diversity mentoring, (vii) knowledge sharing mentoring, (viii) collaborative learning and support mentoring, and (ix) leadership development mentoring. The challenges of mentoring are presented alongside suggested actions to take. I advocate for mentoring evaluation and provide a worked example of measuring the outcomes of one-to-one mentoring using The Career Support and Psychosocial Support Scales (online survey; n = 103 mentees; from 22 countries). Finally, I reflect upon the diversity of mentoring experiences, with activities and benefits categorised into six key areas: interpersonal relationships; networking opportunities; enhancing knowledge and skills; employment, reward and recognition; support for under-served groups; and convening communities of practice. Full article

In this globalization-focused era, the demand for globalized engineers in the creation of borderless societies is increasing. Despite the initiatives by the Japanese government to promote internalization through increasing the intake of foreign students, the exposures gained by the Japanese students from these programs are minimal. For years, internship has been used globally as a platform for training and educating future engineers, but only a few studies have examined the proactive transformation from domestic to international internship. International internships overseas offer a completely new dimension of experiences when carried out in multicultural environments. This article reports and offers evidence of a Japanese engineering university’s rapid global internship reform strategy toward the expansion of international internships in Malaysia. This paper provides insights into the process, from initial setup to implementation of the internship program covering all the necessary preparation and support. From the establishment of an overseas collaboration base and rapport building with hosting industries, the systematic steps taken are reported. Regarding the internship program, feedback from Japanese engineering students who completed their internships show improved satisfaction due to continuous improvement of the internship program with progressing years. It was also discovered that the low participation rate in overseas internship by Japanese students is not due to their inward-looking temperament, but due to the lack of internship program availability that is administered with sufficient preparation enabling them to challenge themselves in a new environment. The challenges encountered in the program, and the sustainable improvements made in alignment with sustainable development goals toward equitable quality education and promotion of lifelong learning are also stated. In this paper, the future perspectives and outlook of internships are also described considering today’s rapid technological advancements and the fast-changing needs of industries, which require future internship programs to have flexible approaches and ideologies. Full article

Destination tourists are a critical stakeholder for developing sustainable tourism. Exchange students as tourists have become a growing segment of the international tourism market. Students undertake courses, internships, or exchange programs at an overseas university for a period of time. Student exchange programs (SEPs) through educational tourism offer exchange students ample learning opportunities from local universities, industries, and other stakeholders. The purpose of this research was to assess the relationships between experiential benefits (including practical business benefits, rural environmental benefits, and personal sociocultural benefits), professional identity, career choice intentions, and support for educational tourism via SEPs. This study surveyed students from Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, and others who attended exchange programs in the field of agriculture in Taiwan and other host countries during the last 15 years and are back in their respective countries. Primary data on exchange students were collected using an online questionnaire survey with a sample size of 326 respondents. The results indicated that professional identity has a full intermediating influence on relationships among experiential benefits, career choice intentions, and support for educational tourism via SEPs. The findings are expected to contribute to the understanding of agricultural students’ SEP behaviors, and to provide suggestions for planning and managing relevant policy to encourage more students to join SEPs overseas. Full article

Internships have been shown to be impactful tools to connect students’ learning in academia with real-world industrial needs. To help the students to get more out of their internship experience, some universities provide a summer internship class in which students do class assignments based on their experiences during their internship. There have been numerous studies on the benefits of internships. However, the benefits of a potential internship class for students in construction management (CM) programs at universities have not yet been investigated. This paper demonstrates the structure of an interview-based internship class and investigates its effectiveness. We have focused on the CM program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) as a case study. We sent online questionnaires to the intern students who took the class, students’ mentors, and the professors who taught the class. The results indicate that despite some challenges to meet the requirements of the class, the students, their mentors, and the professor found the class beneficial. The results of this paper are expected to help CM programs with the establishment and improvement of internship classes in their curriculum. Full article

Offering services to clients by staff is a major feature of the hotel industry. Therefore, maintaining high-quality and stable services is critical for hotels to stay competitive. As for hotel human resource management, how to effectively increase employee retention is crucial because it not only enhances organizational performance but also reduces personnel cost. In this study, the researchers used structural equation modeling to explore the relationship between job embeddedness, organizational commitment, and intention to stay in tourist hotel interns. Furthermore, work–life balance was used as the moderating variable between organizational commitment and intention to stay. The study subjects were interns who had completed between half and one year of an internship at a tourist hotel and were going to graduate from the school upon completing the internship. The results indicated that job embeddedness has a significant and positive effect on organizational commitment and intention to stay whereas organizational commitment mediates the relationships between job embeddedness and intention to stay. In addition, work–life balance moderates interns’ intention to stay. This study provides the hotel industry with useful management guidelines for retaining employees and improving competitiveness. Full article