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An increasing number of organisations are basing their operations on temporary forms of work such as projects to cope with the needs of the modern business environment, which consequently leads to a significant growth in the demand for competent individuals who can not only adequately manage projects, but also seize the opportunities that this new way of doing business brings in the creation of strategic value for organisations. To be considered competent in the field, individuals should therefore demonstrate a certain level of knowledge, skills and abilities that are assessed, developed or improved through certification systems. Although professional certification was previously driven exclusively by the aspirations of individuals for improvement in a business context, to ensure a more professional project practice, the conditions for performing this type of work are starting to be more formalised at the level of employers (requirements in job advertisements) or the state (regulation of certification bodies or legally prescribed requirements for project positions). With the aim of examining the attitude of project professionals towards the competency-based certification in the field of project management and its legal regulations, as well as its role in ensuring the sustainable project delivery, quantitative empirical research was conducted among 246 certified project, programme and portfolio managers in Croatia. The obtained results not only indicate the importance of certification in project delivery and continuous professional development of individuals, but also emphasise insufficient recognition of certification within organisations, its connection with career progress and compliance of practices at the state level.

We draw on 120 years of biographical data (N = 120,764) contained within Who's Who—a unique catalogue of the British elite—to explore the changing relationship between elite schools and elite recruitment. We find that the propulsive power of Britain's public schools has diminished significantly over time. This is driven in part by the wane of military and religious elites, and the rise of women in the labor force. However, the most dramatic declines followed key educational reforms that increased access to the credentials needed to access elite trajectories, while also standardizing and differentiating them. Notwithstanding these changes, public schools remain extraordinarily powerful channels of elite formation. Even today, the alumni of the nine Clarendon schools are 94 times more likely to reach the British elite than are those who attended any other school. Alumni of elite schools also retain a striking capacity to enter the elite even without passing through other prestigious institutions, such as Oxford, Cambridge, or private members clubs. Our analysis not only points to the dogged persistence of the \"old boy,\" but also underlines the theoretical importance of reviving and refining the study of elite recruitment.

We analyze how incumbents in technology-driven industries are influenced by founders' reputation and status when considering strategic alliances with newly emerging firms. We theorize that reputation and status represent two distinct components of perceived quality that exert independent and interdependent effects on alliance formation. Using literature on impression formation processes to derive predictions of signal congruence, we argue that the independent effects of reputation and status are amplified when the two are congruent, and that the effect of negative congruence (both reputation and status are low) is stronger than positive congruence (both are high). We find support for our arguments based on panel data on alliances between pharma and biotech firms, using data on biotech scientists' research output (reputation) and university attended (status).

\"Social psychological research on gendered persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professions is dominated by two explanations: women leave because they perceive their family plans to be at odds with demands of STEM careers, and women leave due to low self-assessment of their skills in STEM's intellectual tasks, net of their performance. This study uses original panel data to examine behavioral and intentional persistence among students who enter an engineering major in college. Surprisingly, family plans do not contribute to women's attrition during college but are negatively associated with men's intentions to pursue an engineering career. Additionally, math self-assessment does not predict behavioral or intentional persistence once students enroll in a STEM major. This study introduces professional role confidence -- individuals' confidence in their ability to successfully fulfill the roles, competencies, and identity features of a profession -- and argues that women's lack of this confidence, compared to men, reduces their likelihood of remaining in engineering majors and careers. We find that professional role confidence predicts behavioral and intentional persistence, and that women's relative lack of this confidence contributes to their attrition.\" (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 2003 bis 2007.

Sociology must worry less about theoretical innovation and more about empirical description.

This study extends current knowledge of upper echelon executive compensation beyond the CEO, specifically CFO compensation, based on whether they possess generalist or specialist skills. We find that \"strategic\" CFOs with an elite MBA (generalist) consistently command a compensation premium, while \"accounting\" CFOs (specialist) and CFOs with a non-MBA master's degree, even from an elite institution, do not. Further, scarce \"strategic\" CFOs are awarded both higher salaries and higher equity-based compensation. Our findings support the view that unique complementarities between scarce CFOs and firms increase these executives' bargaining power leading to pay premium. Our results are robust to post-hiring years, firm sizes, board characteristics, and CFO's insider/outsider status. We contribute at the confluence of upper-echelon compensation, executive human capital, resource-based view, and assortative matching literatures.

This narrative review examines the implications of longitudinal assessment (LA) for certified registered nurse anesthetists, proposing it as an innovative method to enhance continuous professional development and maintain certification. Grounded in theoretical frameworks such as Miller's Pyramid of Clinical Competence and Moore's Expanded Outcomes Framework, this review explores how LA fosters lifelong learning in healthcare and synthesizes current evidence, detailing the integration of frequent, low-stakes assessments and targeted feedback to support knowledge retention and application. The principles of LA--flexibility, rigor, and relevance--are discussed with its potential to address the evolving demands of clinical practice, ensuring patient safety and competence. Key findings highlight the role of LA in reducing stress associated with traditional high-stakes testing while promoting engagement and critical thinking. This review highlights that LA represents a paradigm shift in healthcare education, aligning assessment methods with modern clinical and educational needs. By fostering continuous learning and adaptability, LA enhances clinician growth and improves patient outcomes. Further research is recommended to optimize LA implementation across diverse healthcare specialties.

We study discrimination against immigrants using microlevel data from Switzerland, where, until recently, some municipalities used referendums to decide on the citizenship applications of foreign residents. We show that naturalization decisions vary dramatically with immigrants’ attributes, which we collect from official applicant descriptions that voters received before each referendum. Country of origin determines naturalization success more than any other applicant characteristic, including language skills, integration status, and economic credentials. The average proportion of “no” votes is about 40% higher for applicants from (the former) Yugoslavia and Turkey compared to observably similar applicants from richer northern and western European countries. Statistical and taste-based discrimination contribute to varying naturalization success; the rewards for economic credentials are higher for applicants from disadvantaged origins, and origin-based discrimination is much stronger in more xenophobic municipalities. Moreover, discrimination against specific immigrant groups responds dynamically to changes in the groups’ relative size.

We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. We find compelling evidence that teacher credentials, particularly licensure and certification, affects student achievement in systematic ways and that the magnitudes are large enough to be policy relevant. Our findings imply that the uneven distribution of teacher credentials by race and socioeconomic status of high school students—a pattern we also document—contributes to achievement gaps in high school. In addition, some troubling findings emerge related to the gender and race of the teachers.

We study the process by which employers evaluate and interpret information related to the educational background of job applicants in simulated hiring contexts. We focus on England and the Netherlands, countries with very different education systems and labor-market institutions. Using a vignette study, a quasiexperimental technique, we asked employers to rate a series of résumés of hypothetical job applicants that randomly varied on a number of characteristics, including level of education, field of study, grades, study delays, and internships. Our findings suggest that the informational value of these characteristics varies across the two countries: English employers primarily sort applicants based on relative signals of merit such as grades, in line with queuing theory; Dutch employers instead base their ratings on fields of study and occupation-specific degrees, as predicted by human capital and closure theories. The findings from the vignette study are in line with results obtained from a survey administered to the same employers, corroborating the research validity. This study brings the employers' perspective into a field that has mainly tested theoretical arguments about employers' hiring behavior using employee data. From a theoretical point of view, our approach nuances three well-known theories on the relationship between education and job assignment (human capital, queuing, and closure theories), by specifying the scope conditions under which they are more likely to hold. We show that the reason why education matters to employers and the way employers evaluate educational credentials during the hiring process are conditional on institutions.