Volunteering: A viable alternative work experience for university students?

The Covid-19 pandemic reduced the availability of work placements in commercial organisations for university students and potentially changed the nature of placements in the future. Similarly, charitable organisations who were already suffering budget restrictions have been financially affected by Covid-19 due to reduced revenue on trading activities, with financial sustainability predicted to be an ongoing issue. The opportunity, therefore, for charities to entice university students to volunteer to support their work, with the lure of developing their employability skills, seems irresistible at this time. The purpose of this paper is to examine the content of job advertisements for volunteer positions to determine the extent to which they specify transferable skills desired of the candidates, or state that they can be developed once employed in the post. The underlying assumption is that, to attract student volunteers, job advertisements will need to explicitly state the transferable skills resulting from the post, since students will be focused on developing employability skills through the volunteering activity to support their graduate careers. The paper offers originality by conducting a content analysis of volunteer jobs and assessing the specified criteria against recognised employability skills. It concludes by challenging charities, students and universities to embrace the opportunity for students to develop transferable skills through volunteering by modifying current practices. © The Author(s) 2022.

Enhancing Business Continuity in the Oil and Gas Industry through Electronic Records Management System Usage to Improve Off-Site Working: A Narrative Review

The primary function of an electronic records management system (ERMS) is to support organisations in providing effective records management services by enabling efficient remote access to the organisations’ records. This helps the organisation to continue running during emergency events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The need to study ERMS for accessing records remotely has increased dramatically, due to the increase in daily use. The situation arising from the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need for implementing proper digital systems, such as ERMS, to enable efficient work processes and enhance business continuity. An ERMS has the potential to allow organisations to create records and workflows off-site. During a pandemic, the ability to structure processes digitally helps in maintaining operations remotely. This study aims to provide a narrative review of the ERMS literature with an emphasis on explaining the primary components of ERMS that act as enablers for the implementation of the system in the oil and gas sector of developing countries. The current study proposes ERMS roles and responsibilities that could enhance business continuity. The authors use a qualitative narrative review and analyse the literature related to this study and its findings. The results show that, in cases of risk or crises, staff members need to have easy access to their records and documents to remain productive. An ERMS allows professionals to remain active and work off-site. Thus, ERMS play a significant role in protecting an organisation’s content through the monitoring and control over who has authorisation to access its records. © Burkan Hawash, Umi Asma’ Mokhtar, Zawiyah M. Yusof, Muaadh Mukred, 2022

Effective Implementation of Complex Engineering Problems and Complex Engineering Activities in Malaysian Engineering Curricular

The Engineering Accreditation Council Standard 2020 requires the stipulated 12 programme outcomes that address complex engineering problems (CEP) and complex engineering activities (CEA) to be incorporated in the engineering programmes. However, the implementation of outcome-based education with regards to CEP and CEA is still in the infancy stage. This study was carried out to give an overview of the implementation of complex engineering problems and activities in Malaysian engineering programmes in relation to the types of assessment used to address CEP and CEA, and the typical weightage and taxonomy level of CEP and CEA employed in these assessments. A survey questionnaire was administered to 256 engineering educators from 25 universities to enquire about the implementation of CEP and CEA in their engineering programmes, particularly in the online teaching and learning during the Covid19 pandemic. The findings showed that most of the programmes addressed complex engineering problems in assignments or projects as compared to final examinations or mid-term tests. Complex engineering activities were found to be addressed in Final Year Project, Industrial Training and Integrated Design Project and laboratory courses. The findings in this study could act as a guideline for educators to enhance the teaching and learning activities incorporating CEP and CEA elements, and hence facilitating the continual quality improvement for an engineering programme. © 2021

An application of fuzzy ANP in evaluating stress factors among university's students during online distance learning

The outbreak of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has bring so many impacts on various aspects including education. Nearly two years into the pandemic, close to half of the world's students, including Malaysia, are still affected by partial or full closures of educational institution. In spite of this, to ensure the continuity of learning, one of the initiatives taken by our government is introducing online distance learning (ODL) as the new platforms of learning. However, undeniably, ODL is so stressful and this situation is obviously non-pleasant, especially for the long-term development of the students. Therefore, a research to find out the most influential factors, which contribute to these stresses has been conducted. In this research, a decision-making tool known as the Fuzzy Analytic Network Process (FANP) has been applied. Five main factors which are time management, environment of studies, resources, family and lecturer's concerns, with additional of twenty-one sub-factors were studied. The percentage value of each factor was calculated using the FANP, which produced the rank for each factor. Results shows that, environment of study dominates the ranks, followed by time management, lecturer's concern, resources and the last one is family's concern. © Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence.