Talent Development In European Higher Education

This book examines the much-debated question of how to unleash the potential of young people with promising intellectual abilities and motivation. It looks at the increasingly important topic of excellence in education, and the shift in focus towards the provision of programs to support talented students in higher education. It provides a systematic overview of programs for talented students at northern European higher education institutions (HEIs). Starting in the Netherlands, where nearly all HEIs have developed honors programs over the past two decades, the book explores three clusters of countries: the Benelux, the Nordic and the German-speaking countries. For each of these countries, it discusses the local culture towards excellence, the structure of the education system, and the presence of honors programs. In total, the book reviews the special talent provisions for nearly four million students at 303 higher education institutions in eleven countries. In addition, it offers an analysis of the reasons to develop such programs, a look into the future of honors education and a practical list of suggestions for further research. The Sirius Program assigned Marca Wolfensberger to carry out this research.

This book examines the much-debated question of how to unleash the potential of young people with promising intellectual abilities and motivation. It looks at the increasingly important topic of excellence in education, and the shift in focus towards the provision of programs to support talented students in higher education. It provides a systematic overview of programs for talented students at northern European higher education institutions (HEIs). Starting in the Netherlands, where nearly all HEIs have developed honors programs over the past two decades, the book explores three clusters of countries: the Benelux, the Nordic and the German-speaking countries. For each of these countries, it discusses the local culture towards excellence, the structure of the education system, and the presence of honors programs. In total, the book reviews the special talent provisions for nearly four million students at 303 higher education institutions in eleven countries. In addition, it offers an analysis of the reasons to develop such programs, a look into the future of honors education and a practical list of suggestions for further research. The Sirius Program assigned Marca Wolfensberger to carry out this research.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. This short book aims to present an overview of empirical research on Talent Management, and offers an integrated model that addresses the full nature and scope of TM in practice.

This volume is constructed around several significant questions, relevant to every honors program and national perspective. These questions are: “How do various nations view honors education?”, “How do ideas about honors achievements compare internationally?”, “Who defines honors education in each nation and how similar are those definitions from place to place?”, and “What do nations consider most significant when an undergraduate is said to “graduate with honors”?” The cross-disciplinary, intersecting epistemology of honors education stands out worldwide. No matter whether it is known as “honors”, “honours” or “talent-development”, honors education is associated with a student-centric ethos of attainment-setting, and with comprehensive and often creative approaches to teaching and learning. Today, in our more globally connected world, there is good reason to closely and critically consider how an exploration of honors education worldwide can empower both educators and students to match personal and communal aspirations with educational outcomes.

This volume presents the major outcomes of the third edition of the Future of Higher Education – Bologna Process Researchers Conference (FOHE-BPRC 3) which was held on 27-29 November 2017. It acknowledges the importance of a continued dialogue between researchers and decision-makers and benefits from the experience already acquired, this way enabling the higher education community to bring its input into the 2018-2020 European Higher Education Area (EHEA) priorities. The Future of Higher Education – Bologna Process Researchers Conference (FOHE-BPRC) has already established itself as a landmark in the European higher education environment. The two previous editions (17-19 October 2011, 24-26 November 2014), with approximately 200 European and international participants each, covering more than 50 countries each, were organized prior to the Ministerial Conferences, thus encouraging a consistent dialogue between researchers and policy makers. The main conclusions of the FOHE Conferences were presented at the EHEA Ministerial Conferences (2012 and 2015), in order to make the voice of researchers better heard by European policy and decision makers. This volume is dedicated to continuing the collection of evidence and research-based policymaking and further narrowing the gap between policy and research within the EHEA and broader global contexts. It aims to identify the research areas that require more attention prior to the anniversary 2020 EHEA Ministerial Conference, with an emphasis on the new issues on rise in the academic and educational community. This book gives a platform for discussion on key issues between researchers, various direct higher education actors, decision-makers, and the wider public. This book is published under an open access CC BY license.

This book examines governance reforms in higher education in six European countries: Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. It focuses in particular on the governance of the systems and institutions in these countries. The book shows that each of the national reform processes has been characterised by its own specific pathways embedded in the country’s specific socio-economic contexts and cultures, but also has a number of features in common with the other countries and processes. The first chapter of the book presents a conceptual framework to analyse the reform processes as an ’implementation game’ played by several actors with diverse interests. The second chapter describes the national reform processes of the six selected countries, giving a voice to the individual university rectors and officials who played an important role during the reform processes. Their stories constitute a vivid narrative of the government drivers of reform and of the rationales of the institutions as main partners in the reform processes. These narratives are analysed, complemented by, and contrasted with a review of the literature on the subject in the third chapter. The final chapter consist of concluding remarks and lessons learned.

The essence of the functioning of any organization, whether commercial or non-profit, is to provide value to groups of recipients whose expectations undoubtedly change over time. Various competition mechanisms in the market apply to both business-oriented organizations and organizations operating in the sphere of public utilities. This monograph includes examples of the problems facing contemporary organizations, and at the same time provides evidence, confirmed by research results, that indicates the direction of current changes. The analysis of changes taking place in organizations was carried out in many dimensions. The content layout adopted in the monograph presents four research perspectives, where the subject of the research is the organization; the modern tools used in organization management, the impact of the market economy on organizations, and sectoral or industry aspects of the organization’s functioning. In the first chapter, four studies related to commercial and non-commercial organizations have been collated. Researchers of academic organizations who in order to meet the expectations of students increase their activity in the field of entrepreneurship and their support for the most talented students. Both examples show the need to conduct research, develop knowledge about own activities, and focus on the needs of the environment. Entrepreneurial universities are open to the implementation of joint ventures with entities in their environment, which affect the development of the university, its students, as well as the entities. Entrepreneurship, which is based on the ability to take advantage of market opportunities, also creates opportunities for developing the ability to flexibly shape and adapt programs, methods and operating principles to the growing expectations of their environment. The ability to develop your potential as well as the potential of your students plays a crucial role. In the pursuit of excellence, a strong focus should be placed on talented students and the development of all possible forms of support that could determine an output of graduates with particularly high development potential. In the research presented in this monograph, the authors compare the activity of universities in the USA, the Netherlands, and Poland in the area of talent development. The comparative analysis becomes a valuable source of indicating imperfections, but also examples of potential forms of positive activity in this area. Equally important in this part of the monograph is the research on the learning organization. Through a bibliometric analysis, the author identified the fields of research on the learning organization. In addition to research areas related to various dimensions, primarily human, cultural and managerial, the types of organizations in which such research is most often conducted have been indicated. They also include the organizations of the two sectors presented: education and healthcare. The same part of the monograph also presents the results of research in the hotel sector, where the main research problem was the creation of customer value, taking into account the conditions stimulating the dynamics of the business models of hotel enterprises. Referring to business models was considered important because of the significance of decision-making patterns that help to build a competitive advantage and achieve market success by creating value for customers. The concept of creating value for customers is currently treated in cross-sectoral or industry categories and is a universal approach to managing organizations. The second chapter of the monograph presents research on the modern tools used in organization management. Concepts such as work–life balance, shaping the innovation process within the framework of decisions taken in the process, marketing communication, or the use of gamification in research and development, are examples of a wide range of relationships between today’s organization and its surroundings. Finding employees, and retaining them, is also a growing challenge in developing countries, where labor supply is steadily decreasing. The expectations of employees are increasing, especially in relation to respecting the personal, non-professional side of life. Thus, it should be recognized that research on work–life balance is a developing space for organization and management researchers. Modeling the innovation process in an organization is another research trend that is important today, especially in terms of developing competitiveness. Decision-making is one of the key components of the innovation process. This aspect, in qualitative terms, was presented in the next study in the second part of the monograph. Similarly, marketing communication is invariably an important area of research in organizations, which has evolved due to rapidly developing information technologies and, at the same time, the changing preferences of users of these technologies. The last study in this second part of the monograph relates to innovation and the use of computer games. The tools of gamification are used to shape the attitudes of individual energy consumers. The observations presented show that it is worth making attempts to use unconventional methods and tools, in this case, to develop customer knowledge and strengthen the behaviors desired in the energy market. The third chapter of the monograph is devoted to the financial aspects of the functioning of commercial and non-profit organizations in a market economy. Increasing the efficiency of public entities, specifically conditioned in economic policies and dependent on political decisions, has been the subject of numerous studies. The research study presented in the monograph refers to the relationship between financial strategies and profit management in public industrial companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. It is worth noting that no research in this field has been conducted to date in the context of the Polish capital market. The next study refers to the French market. Its purpose was to evaluate and test long-term memory in the French stock exchanges. Research results contribute significantly to explaining the lack of consensus regarding long memory in stock returns. The research covers a significant, 25-year period of operation of the Euronext platform during which 6634 observations were provided. The conclusions of the study may be particularly important for regulators and risk managers. Another study presents the results of bankruptcy risk tests for Polish and Czech logistics companies using a comprehensive classification approach. As a result of the research, a tool for risk assessment and forecasting was developed, enabling the early prediction of bankruptcy of enterprises. At the end of the third chapter of the monograph, the results of health expenditure analysis based on information provided by the Health Account System are presented. Particular attention has been focused on the programming sources of financing healthcare in new European Union countries. Socio-technical and environmental aspects of the organization are the subject of interest of researchers presenting the results of their research in the fourth chapter of the monograph. The problems of economic migration and working conditions have been the subject of interest for many years in the strongly developing trend of labor market research. The research results contained in the study relate primarily to the issues of occupational safety of Ukrainians employed in Poland. These issues are gaining importance, especially when the number of people migrating from Ukraine to Poland in search of work has been growing for several years. In the face of such a large scale of Ukrainian immigrants employed in Polish enterprises, there is still a lack of regulations protecting or securing the interests of employees and employers. The next research presentation highlights the problems of the “circular economy,” which, according to the author, is developing too slowly in Poland. The research is valuable for systematizing the idea of a circular economy based on the theoretical and practical aspects of this phenomenon. The results of the analysis are also of practical importance for the process of modeling and implementing this idea in Poland. Further, the innovation paradigm of economic health and the prosperity of society is the subject of the research carried out, based on a review of the health economy considering innovation and its impact on population growth and prosperity in the world. The research particularly highlights the consequences of socio-demographic, environmental and business changes in the field of consumer goods. The socio-technical, as well as the environmental, aspects of the organization are also included in the last study presented. The purpose of this study was to identify the attitudes of IT employees in the Polish ITC sector towards remote work. Since the effective and efficient collaboration of distributed employees performing remote work has become even more necessary for the success of projects, numerous research works are being conducted focusing on the consequences of remote work. The presented research results are an important contribution to the discussion of researchers and management practitioners. By publishing this monograph, which covers a wide spectrum of research problems in contemporary commercial and non-profit organizations, the editors and authors presenting the results of their research express a hope that they are contributing to the widespread dissemination and enrichment of knowledge and, consequently, socio-economic development.

This book contributes to the understanding of the responsibilities of Higher Education in the evolving societal, political and economic landscape. It raises questions about its role in society, its responsibility towards students and staff, and its intended impact.