Editorial

摘要

Welcome to the penultimate issue of 2011, with six papers of international interest from Jordan, Malaysia, the UK, Belgium and Qatar. In the first paper, Samer Khasawneh of the Hashemite University, Jordan, gives us a piece on human capital planning in higher education (HE) in which 120 administrative faculty employees responded to the survey. The results of the study indicated that HE institutions (HEIs) have a strong level of human capital planning (HCP): examples of HCP included identifying sources of relevant employment and workforce data, establishing competency models, training internal talent, updating and accuracy of job descriptions, and establishing organisational learning practices that encourage employees to engage in lifelong learning. There were no significant gender differences, although there were some differences regarding some chairs of departments. A number of theoretical and planning recommendations are suggested. The study of a business management faculty in Malaysia is a paper by multiple authors fronted by Salina Daud, in which the potential gap between important dimensions of business graduates' attitudes and their actual performance in post-graduate performance employment is investigated. The business graduates were from a faculty of a university based in peninsular Malaysia. The attributes and performance of those graduates was considered in four broad areas-knowledge, skills, abilities, and personality. The results of the study show that managers attach different weightings to different aspects of the graduates' performance. Curriculum development should be directed towards attributes that are expected of the graduates and relevant to the needs of the employment market (an argument sometimes heard in other countries but not always accepted - Editor). It should be noted that the study is of graduates of a business school and future research could establish whether there is a consistent pattern across HEIs in different countries where there may be different expectations.