an article by Amparo Jimenez Vivas (Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Spain) and David Menendez Alvarez-Hevia (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) published in European Journal of Higher Education Volume 7 Issue 4 (2017)
Abstract
This article provides an overview of the literature that contributes to the study of the key factors that explain the process by which university graduates enter the labour market. It is approached from the standpoint of the Spanish experience but also discusses other European initiatives.
Understanding this process is paramount for the modernization of the university offering. The entry of university graduates into the labour market is characterized by complex and multiple interrelations of factors that include both contextual/social and individual/personal variables.
This study argues that a multidimensional analysis of the process and the different variables involved contributes to the development of appropriate career plans and university employability strategies.
The article focuses on discussing the personal variables that shape individual paths and presents an analysis of a number of categories and elements that are essential if the transition from university to the labour market is to take place successfully.
Monday, 1 January 2018
19 Things to Start Doing for Yourself in the New Year
a post by Maria Stenvinkel for the Tiny Buddha blog
“And suddenly you know… it’s time to start something new and trust the magic of new beginnings.” ~Unknown
Did you know that 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail?
That’s pretty crazy. Maybe you’re part of that statistic. Feeling eager, excited, and ready for change only to fall back into old patterns after a few weeks.
This was me, year after year – striving for change but not managing to pull it through, but not last year.
A few days ago I found a letter I had written to myself on New Year’s Eve in 2016, describing how I wanted 2017 to unfold. I described what I wanted to accomplish for my business, the kind of people I wanted to surround myself with, and most importantly, how I wanted to feel through it all.
To my surprise, I noticed how much I actually had accomplished. Even though my letter was very ambitious (oops, went down that road again…), I noticed how my vision, focus, and intentions had placed me in the right direction throughout the year.
In previous years, my focus had been on achieving things such as exercising three times per week, eating only healthy food, and quitting bad habits. You know, concrete results. This time, however, my focus was on working toward my vision of the future I desire while growing and enjoying myself in the process.
In simple terms: making sure I was happy while working toward a compelling future. So, whenever I put down a goal, I also made sure to define how I wanted it to feel.
For example, instead of deciding “I’m going to exercise three times per week” I wrote “I’m gonna love my body and take really good care of it by practicing yoga, dancing, or doing other activities I feel drawn to do.”
To help stir your imagination for the New Year – so that you’re not pushed by pressure, but instead pulled by pleasure – I’ve listed nineteen things you could start doing.
Continue reading
“And suddenly you know… it’s time to start something new and trust the magic of new beginnings.” ~Unknown
Did you know that 80 percent of New Year’s resolutions fail?
That’s pretty crazy. Maybe you’re part of that statistic. Feeling eager, excited, and ready for change only to fall back into old patterns after a few weeks.
This was me, year after year – striving for change but not managing to pull it through, but not last year.
A few days ago I found a letter I had written to myself on New Year’s Eve in 2016, describing how I wanted 2017 to unfold. I described what I wanted to accomplish for my business, the kind of people I wanted to surround myself with, and most importantly, how I wanted to feel through it all.
To my surprise, I noticed how much I actually had accomplished. Even though my letter was very ambitious (oops, went down that road again…), I noticed how my vision, focus, and intentions had placed me in the right direction throughout the year.
In previous years, my focus had been on achieving things such as exercising three times per week, eating only healthy food, and quitting bad habits. You know, concrete results. This time, however, my focus was on working toward my vision of the future I desire while growing and enjoying myself in the process.
In simple terms: making sure I was happy while working toward a compelling future. So, whenever I put down a goal, I also made sure to define how I wanted it to feel.
For example, instead of deciding “I’m going to exercise three times per week” I wrote “I’m gonna love my body and take really good care of it by practicing yoga, dancing, or doing other activities I feel drawn to do.”
To help stir your imagination for the New Year – so that you’re not pushed by pressure, but instead pulled by pleasure – I’ve listed nineteen things you could start doing.
Continue reading
Will you be able to afford a flat if you stop buying avocado toast?
an article by Oliver Burkeman published in the Guardian
Weighing up your spending isn’t simple: should you invest in making your future better or enjoying life right now?
Illustration: Michele Marconi for the Guardian
Back in the 1990s, the American personal finance guru David Bach coined the term “the Latte Factor” (these days, it’s a registered trademark) and a money myth was born. You could retire a millionaire, Bach promised, just by forgoing your daily trip to Starbucks and investing the money instead!
The only problem is, you can’t. In her 2012 book Pound Foolish, Helaine Olen points out that Bach assumed a 365-day-a-year latte habit; added a daily biscotti to increase the cost; rounded up the annual total by a three-figure sum; assumed improbably high investment returns; and ignored inflation and taxes. But the Latte Factor ticked so many boxes, it didn’t seem to matter that these didn’t include the one marked “accurate”. It distracted from systemic problems, made financial security look like a simple matter of self-discipline, and implied that you could get there without sacrificing anything that mattered.
The 2017 version of the Latte Factor is, of course, estate agents berating millennials for spending money on fancy sandwiches or avocado toast, on the grounds that if they saved it, they could afford a flat in a pricey city. Naturally, the maths is also dodgy: by my reckoning, the latest story assumes an £11 sandwich every working day, plus a £100-plus weekly night out. Even if the numbers added up, though, the Sandwich Factor would still be questionable, and not only because it looks like blaming the victims of the housing crisis, but because it’s not always wiser to spend money on making your future better, as opposed to enjoying it now. That’s an individual calculation, based on how much you love sandwiches, or whether you’d be prepared to move to a cheaper part of the country. And it’s easily possible to delay gratification too much – to fall victim to what the psychologist Jack Block called “rigid impulse control”, thereby “spoil[ing] the experience and savourings of life”. Having less fun in your 20s in order to feel more secure in your 50s might be worth it, but it’s far from an indisputable truth.
Continue reading
Weighing up your spending isn’t simple: should you invest in making your future better or enjoying life right now?
Illustration: Michele Marconi for the Guardian
Back in the 1990s, the American personal finance guru David Bach coined the term “the Latte Factor” (these days, it’s a registered trademark) and a money myth was born. You could retire a millionaire, Bach promised, just by forgoing your daily trip to Starbucks and investing the money instead!
The only problem is, you can’t. In her 2012 book Pound Foolish, Helaine Olen points out that Bach assumed a 365-day-a-year latte habit; added a daily biscotti to increase the cost; rounded up the annual total by a three-figure sum; assumed improbably high investment returns; and ignored inflation and taxes. But the Latte Factor ticked so many boxes, it didn’t seem to matter that these didn’t include the one marked “accurate”. It distracted from systemic problems, made financial security look like a simple matter of self-discipline, and implied that you could get there without sacrificing anything that mattered.
The 2017 version of the Latte Factor is, of course, estate agents berating millennials for spending money on fancy sandwiches or avocado toast, on the grounds that if they saved it, they could afford a flat in a pricey city. Naturally, the maths is also dodgy: by my reckoning, the latest story assumes an £11 sandwich every working day, plus a £100-plus weekly night out. Even if the numbers added up, though, the Sandwich Factor would still be questionable, and not only because it looks like blaming the victims of the housing crisis, but because it’s not always wiser to spend money on making your future better, as opposed to enjoying it now. That’s an individual calculation, based on how much you love sandwiches, or whether you’d be prepared to move to a cheaper part of the country. And it’s easily possible to delay gratification too much – to fall victim to what the psychologist Jack Block called “rigid impulse control”, thereby “spoil[ing] the experience and savourings of life”. Having less fun in your 20s in order to feel more secure in your 50s might be worth it, but it’s far from an indisputable truth.
Continue reading
Many different types of anxiety and depression exist, new study finds
an article from Stanford University published in Medical XPress [via World of Psychology]
Five new categories of mental illness that cut across the current more broad diagnoses of anxiety and depression have been identified by researchers in a Stanford-led study.
The five categories, defined by their specific symptoms and areas of brain activation, are: tension, anxious arousal, general anxiety, anhedonia – the inability to feel pleasure – and melancholia.
"We are trying to disentangle the symptom overlap in our current diagnoses which can ultimately guide tailored treatment choices," the researchers wrote in their study, which was published in JAMA Psychiatry.
The research is part of an ongoing effort by Leanne Williams, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and senior author of the study, and her lab, along with other groups within the field of psychiatric neuroscience, to better define mental illness in order to provide improved treatment plans for the millions of Americans who suffer from these disorders.
Currently, depression and anxiety are the leading cause of disability and lost productivity worldwide with only one-third of patients recovering from treatment, the study said. [I am not sure where this figure of one-third came from but it seems to me to be a very high proportion.]
The broad diagnostic categories as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, such as anxiety and depression, have so many overlapping symptoms that it’s difficult to identify biological markers for potential treatments or cures, the researchers explained.
Continue reading
Five new categories of mental illness that cut across the current more broad diagnoses of anxiety and depression have been identified by researchers in a Stanford-led study.
The five categories, defined by their specific symptoms and areas of brain activation, are: tension, anxious arousal, general anxiety, anhedonia – the inability to feel pleasure – and melancholia.
"We are trying to disentangle the symptom overlap in our current diagnoses which can ultimately guide tailored treatment choices," the researchers wrote in their study, which was published in JAMA Psychiatry.
The research is part of an ongoing effort by Leanne Williams, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and senior author of the study, and her lab, along with other groups within the field of psychiatric neuroscience, to better define mental illness in order to provide improved treatment plans for the millions of Americans who suffer from these disorders.
Currently, depression and anxiety are the leading cause of disability and lost productivity worldwide with only one-third of patients recovering from treatment, the study said. [I am not sure where this figure of one-third came from but it seems to me to be a very high proportion.]
The broad diagnostic categories as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, such as anxiety and depression, have so many overlapping symptoms that it’s difficult to identify biological markers for potential treatments or cures, the researchers explained.
Continue reading
British law must recognise Muslim marriage ceremonies
an article by Bilal Hassam published in the Guardian
If the UK could do it for Quakers 250 years ago, is it too much to ask parliament to consider the needs of newer faith communities?
‘It’s no surprise to me though that only a fifth of British Muslims under 25 surveyed had a civil ceremony in addition to their nikkah.’ Photograph: Runner Of Art/Getty Images
When I had my nikah, my Islamic marriage ceremony, I considered myself a married man. In the presence of our nearest and dearest, squeezed into my partner’s front room in Grimsby, an imam led us through a series of vows and the signing of our marriage certificate before offering a prayer and declaring us husband and wife.
It was a beautiful, intimate and uniquely British ceremony, captured by British Muslim TV and featured on Channel 4’s documentary The Truth About Muslim Marriage. This groundbreaking film highlights the toxic fallout of our legal system’s failure to recognise an Islamic marriage as valid.
Three out of five of the British Muslim women surveyed did not, in addition to their nikah ceremonies, have a civil marriage, rendering them outside the legal protections and provisions that marriage brings. I can understand why. If you already consider yourself married, the only real reason to have a civil ceremony is to establish protections in case you divorce. But who thinks about divorce when they’re getting married?
Continue reading
If the UK could do it for Quakers 250 years ago, is it too much to ask parliament to consider the needs of newer faith communities?
‘It’s no surprise to me though that only a fifth of British Muslims under 25 surveyed had a civil ceremony in addition to their nikkah.’ Photograph: Runner Of Art/Getty Images
When I had my nikah, my Islamic marriage ceremony, I considered myself a married man. In the presence of our nearest and dearest, squeezed into my partner’s front room in Grimsby, an imam led us through a series of vows and the signing of our marriage certificate before offering a prayer and declaring us husband and wife.
It was a beautiful, intimate and uniquely British ceremony, captured by British Muslim TV and featured on Channel 4’s documentary The Truth About Muslim Marriage. This groundbreaking film highlights the toxic fallout of our legal system’s failure to recognise an Islamic marriage as valid.
Three out of five of the British Muslim women surveyed did not, in addition to their nikah ceremonies, have a civil marriage, rendering them outside the legal protections and provisions that marriage brings. I can understand why. If you already consider yourself married, the only real reason to have a civil ceremony is to establish protections in case you divorce. But who thinks about divorce when they’re getting married?
Continue reading
Vocational education, manufacturing, and income distribution: International evidence from Germany, the US, Thailand, and Vietnam
a column by Joshua Aizenman, Yothin Jinjarak, Nam Ngo and Ilan Noy for VOX: CEPR’s Policy Portal
The Global Crisis and its aftermath has focused attention on increasing inequality, and specifically on declining real incomes of the working poor. Comparing the US to Germany, this column argues that pushing more students to degree-granting colleges may no longer be the most efficient way to deal with the challenges caused by the decline in manufacturing employment affecting, in particular, lower-income households. Well-resourced, well-targeted vocational training can prove to be a better long-term investment in skill acquisition to help ameliorate the difficulties faced by workers whose prospects look to be quite bleak.
Continue reading
The Global Crisis and its aftermath has focused attention on increasing inequality, and specifically on declining real incomes of the working poor. Comparing the US to Germany, this column argues that pushing more students to degree-granting colleges may no longer be the most efficient way to deal with the challenges caused by the decline in manufacturing employment affecting, in particular, lower-income households. Well-resourced, well-targeted vocational training can prove to be a better long-term investment in skill acquisition to help ameliorate the difficulties faced by workers whose prospects look to be quite bleak.
Continue reading
What’s Happening to Men Today?
a post by Linda Sapadin for the World of Psychology blog
Recently I wrote about my experiences growing up with guys who groped, leered, flashed me and more. Since then I’ve received many letters from women who thanked me for writing about “their” experiences. And one letter from a man, expressing regrets that I had to go through all that.
This week I’m writing about the growing tide of #MeToo stories that are toppling powerful men.
Four important questions are haunting me; questions that we need to ask ourselves if we want to fully appreciate the changes that are happening in our culture. Though a book could be written about any one of these topics, I’ll attempt a brief answer to each one.
Continue reading
Recently I wrote about my experiences growing up with guys who groped, leered, flashed me and more. Since then I’ve received many letters from women who thanked me for writing about “their” experiences. And one letter from a man, expressing regrets that I had to go through all that.
This week I’m writing about the growing tide of #MeToo stories that are toppling powerful men.
Four important questions are haunting me; questions that we need to ask ourselves if we want to fully appreciate the changes that are happening in our culture. Though a book could be written about any one of these topics, I’ll attempt a brief answer to each one.
Continue reading
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