Human capital is professional service firms' most valuable resource and its quality is closely linked to the quality of its services. The purpose of this study is to investigate how professional service firms appraise their employees. A comparative study between an architecture firm and a management consulting firm is conducted with the aim to identify and explain similarities and differences in performance appraisal. Two qualitative case studies are performed and interviews as well as documents are used to explore the area. The thesis builds on a critical perspective and it has an explorative approach.

The purpose of the study is to investigate into Professional knowledge of the bilingual teachers, compared to monolingual, and what benefits they give to pre-school. Qualitative method was used to get an understanding of informant´s perspective on bilingual teachers. The informants believe that bilingual teachers are able to understand all the children. A bilingual teacher can make the children feel secure. If one has a positive attitude toward bilingualism, the bilingual children also show a positive attitude that in turn contributes to learning and development of the language..

Talented people are recognised as being the most important corporate resource over the next twenty years and a competitive compensation system is an important tool in attracting and retaining talent. Traditional pay systems are recognised as being neither cost effective nor motivating people to do more. Often these systems do not contribute to strategic objectives. This study outlines what constitutes an intelligent remuneration system that will enhance the mind value added by knowledge workers, reward knowledge creation, and contribute to organisational strategies..

It is common that patients experience emotional reactions as agony and anxiety after an acute myocardial infarction. Only a few studies related to the support in the acute stage have been made. The aim was to describe how nurses declared their support to patients with acute myocardial infarction in the acute stage. The used method was semi structured interviews with seven nurses in an Emergency ward in South of Sweden. The material was processed and analysed with inspiration from content analysis and produced two main themes.

The aim of this essay was to investigate how teachers in the preschool class work with literacy. How do they justify the methods used to develop children's literacy abilities? I also wanted to know to what extent teachers enable multimodal approaches within written language practices. My study considers the impact teachers' professional identity has on working methods in the preschool class. I hope this essay will help teachers reflect on their learning approach. I gathered information by interviewing three preschool teachers and one compulsory school teacher for the early years working in three different preschool classes in three different schools.

The main purpose of this Master's thesis is to investigate the new librarians' experiences and skills in the context of their present work situation and the ongoing debate about the librarian's professional identity and status. Further, the authors wanted to find out whether the new librarians' experiences and knowledge developed throughout their education correspond to the requirements of the employers. Finally, they try to assess theimpact of the "academization" of the library schools on the status of the profession. The data consist of an opinion poll. The investigation is based on questionnaires distributed as a web survey.

This report deals with the theory and empirical evidence of how knowledge generated within a project is to be captured and shared with other projects and the surrounding organization, after the end of a project. A number of authors have highlighted knowledge management within a company as a key component in building a unique competitive advantage and knowledge should therefore be considered a very important resource within companies. The difficulties of ensuring that knowledge generated within a project can benefit other projects are many. The nature of the project form has been highlighted as one of the biggest problems, due to the fact that budget and time requirements often restrict the propensity to work with knowledge transfer. Other difficulties that this report highlights are in particular the lack of a knowledge sharing culture within the organizations, as well as human cognitive and psychological limitations and lack of tools design for knowledge transfer.

This paper examines the professional role of the music journalist and how it has been affected by the expansion of the Internet. The study aims to examine  the profession's outlook and how professional music journalists are working to reach the public with interesting information, despite the fact that the audience of today often can be first to deliver the news. Through qualitative research interviews with three current music journalists the professional role and its development is examined. Based on theories and previous research on journalism, how the media communicates and its importance to society, what it is to be a music journalist and the spread of digitization and the impact of file sharing the results are analyzed. The conclusions of the study are that it isn?t a profession that is disappearing but rather a profession that is working towards a new future.

This study finds that the Swedish Government has a process for purchasing financial advisory services that is more transaction-oriented than the corresponding process at a Swedish private equity firm. The conclusion is supported by previous research comparing public and private sector purchasing processes. However, the differences between the two purchasing processes are not as significant as one might believe given the fact that the Government, unlike the private equity firm, has to operate under the Public Procurement Act (LOU). The tendency of the Swedish Government to apply a more relationoriented purchasing approach than expected is most likely driven by the fact that this represents the established professional norm for purchasing of professional services in the private sector. As LOU and the professional norm impose contradictory influences on the Swedish Government?s purchasing of financial advisory services, the final outcome depends on which of the two forces that dominate..

Knowledge is today one of the most important resources for an organization to handle. But knowledge can also be difficult for organizations to manage. The internet is still growing and new tools take form that allows users to effectively share information. The purpose of this report was to describe how organizations can make use out of internal social media to facilitate knowledge management processes. Three issues involving mapping, coding and dissemination of knowledge to were produced to answer the thesis. The study was limited to examining the identification, coding and dissemination of knowledge through the internal social media plattformen, IBM Connections. The theoretical framework emphasizes how social networks can promote knowledge sharing, how a knowledge mapping can promote knowledge dissemination and sharing, how knowledge can be stored in data sources and how important interaction is to spread awareness. The theory has been supplemented by descriptions of how the system IBM Connections works. Surveys were conducted on four companies that use IBM Connections as an internal communication plattformen. The four companies were selected to illustrate how they use the plattformen of knowledge management processes and we chose to interview the people who were responsible for the introduction of the plattformen. The study identified several similarities between the different companies and that although there were some technical and cultural recalcitrant units against this new type of system within the organization so favored IBM Connections knowledge in several ways. The built-in search automatic created a map of knowledge through the plattform's user profiles. Saved files and documents could be found even after the employees left the company, which encodes knowledge into the company knowledge resources. The opportunity to interact with one another, often over great distances, favored the sharing of knowledge. A comparison with the theoretical framework provided us with the conclusion that internal social media can be used in several ways to Knowledge management through automated knowledge maps, the ability to store knowledge within the company and to communicate knowledge across functional and geographical boundaries in interactive discussions..

A big part of assets in companies today consists of their employees knowledge and skills. In today?s society knowledge insensitive companies are increasing. The survival of these companies lie in the knowledge of their employees, which make it of great importance that knowledge transfer is managed properly. Knowledge transfer is important since it makes it possible for co-workers to apply old solutions to new problems that arise, using knowledge that already existing within the organization.

The importance of chemical use is enormous for areas such as agriculture, industry and medicine and hence a prerequisite for our modern society. In order to protect humans and the environment from the negative effects of chemical use, chemical regulations have been used at a relatively early stage in our history. The purpose of REACH, the new chemical regulation of the European Union, is to generate new knowledge of chemicals within the European market and to increase the responsibilities of the enterprises when it comes to risk management. Whether the enterprises will implement the regulations or not will be of vital importance for the realization of the law?s intentions.The purpose of this study was to identify possibilities and problems that can occur when a downstream-user SME is about to implement REACH.

Title:Professional skills in public and private sectors Date:2011-05-18 Authors:Zinajda Avdic & Binasa Jasarevic Tutor:Viktorija Kalonaityte Examiner:Richard Nakamura Key words:Competence, professional, public sector and private sector. Thesis purpose:To find out what factors are behind the company and the authority identifies  their training needs, what methods they use in the evaluation of outcomes can be integrated into the organization.Method:A qualitative study with a hermeneutic approach and an abduction approach. Theory:The theory depends substances skills, skills needs and skills assessment. Empirical data:Data collected through two interview people on the two public sectors authorities, and two companies in the private sector.Conclusion:We found that organizations put a lot of time and resources to develop, identify and plan professional skills through internal and external courses. The differences between them are determined not by the fact that they are in the public sector or the private, but from organization to organization.

Organizations that want to maintain a good innovation capability can seek knowledge both within and outside its boundaries. Opening up innovation processes, through so-called open innovation, allows organizations to combine internal and external knowledge sources in order to include previously excluded perspectives to the innovation process. This study examines how knowledge is created and transferred when conducting open innovation through crowdsourcing. It is done based on Nonaka?s (1991; 1994) theory of how knowledge is created through conversion processes, where implicit knowledge can be converted into explicit knowledge and vice versa.

This degree project is made for Cervera in Norrköping and Linköping. The task was to create a professional interactive homepage for the company where the company's range of products can be presented. Besides a homepage aimed towards potential customers, an online Internet-application where the company's employees can update, erase, and create posts that are stored in the database was created. The main programming languages have been PHP and HTML in combination with databases in MySQL. The final result was a functional, professional and informative homepage with a simple and pedagogical application for the employees.