Our educational curriculum appears not to be meeting the skills needed in today's job market. While much literature explains the necessary inclusion of subtle skill instruction in our formal education, empirical evidence on its permeation and levels of success is limited. This study is guided by three research questions: can training improve productivity, lead to increased entrepreneurs and reduced unemployment in Nigeria? A qualitative research design was used. 110 out of 360 trainers and participant of skills acquisition programme of the National Directorate of Employment (NDE) in Delta State for 2010 and 2011 was sampled. Descriptive statistics was used for inference from field data and chi-square was used to test the hypothesis. The result reveals that skills acquisition institutions have a great part to play in job creation and growth of entrepreneurial activities in Nigeria. The study discovered that the main problems confronting skills acquisition in Nigeria are capital for setting up the trainees after the programme, policy inconsistencies, corruption, and poor project targeting. The study recommended proper funding of skills training by the states and the inclusion of skills training in the school curriculum for sustainable development.

Danone, a multinational food company based in Paris, uses its enterprise systems to analyze and measure the sustainability impact of products. Image courtesy of Flickr user Whitneyinchicago. Consumers today are concerned with more than just quality and price. Increasingly, they also care about the social and environmental impacts of products. Indeed, many ask questions like: […]

While Cruz, Larraza-Kintana, Garcés-Galdeano, and Berrone demonstrate how SEW can simultaneously elicit good and bad behavior in regard to corporate social responsibility, their findings also give rise to the idea that maintaining control and influence over day-to-day operations (internal socioemotional wealth [SEW]) and maintaining positive assessments of the firm's reputation (external SEW) may at times be in conflict. This commentary builds upon this notion by highlighting the need to explicitly examine SEW conflict, as well as offering initial theorizing on how family firms will pursue SEW preservation in these situations. Drawing on image theory, we theorize a process where preserving internal SEW is generally used as the guiding script in family firms because it is more salient on an everyday basis. However, we propose that if its preservation threatens the organization's identity and reputation, the script will be disrupted, precipitating a shift to preserving external SEW. The article concludes by discussing the broader theoretical implications of SEW conflict for family firms.

AVCJ

Hony Capital has made its second partial exit from CSPC Pharmaceutical Group in three months, selling an 11% stake in the Hong Kong-listed Chinese generic drugs maker for HK$4.01 billion ($528 million).