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This paper presents a typology exploring employers’ perceptions of the quality of available applicants and employers decisions to buy qualified staff vs. to hire available workers and then make i.e. develop them via employer-supported training.

This study uses 2015 survey data from Southwestern Ontario, Canada, based on responses from 834 employers regarding their hiring, separations, training and other HRM policies.

Among surveyed employers, 10% are “Reliants” who found the quality of available applicants to be low, yet these employers do not provide employee training. Almost half of employers (at 45%) are “Developers” who find the quality of applicants to be low but they do provide employee training. Approximately, 7% of employers are “Poachers” who find that the quality of applicants is high and do not provide employee training, while 38% are Refiners, who find the quality of applicants is high and they provide employee training.

Employers need to make their training decisions in alignment with their assessment of the quality of job applicants to whom they have access. In this paper, decisions on training and applicant quality are considered concurrently. From an academic viewpoint, the findings raise the issue as to whether other stakeholders (such as educational institutions) are sufficiently helping individuals gain the skills, credentials and work experiences that employers are seeking. If job openings are remaining unfilled because employers are unwilling to hire those available, then applicants lose, employers lose and societies lose.

More than 10 years after its founding, the STEM Women of Color Conclave® has emerged as the largest safe brave space in the United States for women faculty of color in the academic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Originally intended to be a national assembly, the Conclave® has evolved into a safe brave space that serves as a refuge for STEM women faculty of color who are regularly taxed with the struggle of having to navigate the unwelcoming, and often hostile, environments of the ivory tower in very unique ways. This chapter narrates how the Conclave's founding members journeyed toward creating and sustaining this safe brave space. The reader is awakened to deeper awareness of and sensitivities for the ways in which safe brave spaces must address both the complexities related to struggle – and liberation from that struggle – for both occupiers and observers of safe brave spaces. However, just as the quantum observer can disturb the system just by observing it and, ultimately, change or even nullify the results, we recognize that merely observing the Conclave® would nullify its intended purpose and, in the end, render it unsafe. Therefore, the reader can anticipate an absence of direct observations, reports of outcomes, or specific accounts of progress related to the occupiers of our safe brave space. Rather, the chapter offers an invitation to the reader to explore the authors' lived experiences as occupiers who designed a safe brave space. We invite the reader, particularly those who are also observers of safe brave spaces, to join us in protecting these valuable spaces.

The nation's first Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were founded before the end of the U.S. Civil War. However, most were established in the post-Civil War era, through the Freedmen's Bureau and other organizations such as the American Missionary Association (AMA) when the U.S. federal government initiated an organized effort to educate newly freed slaves (Hoffman, 1996). Additional support for HBCUs arose from the second Morrill Act of 1890, which provided opportunities for all races in those states where Black students were excluded from public higher education. Thus, since their founding in the 1800s, the nation's HBCUs have had as their missions to provide access to higher education for the disenfranchised and underprivileged of our society. Today, these institutions continue to make significant contributions in educating African American and other underrepresented minority students, particularly in the areas of science and engineering. Although they comprise only 3% of U.S. institutions of higher education, HBCUs in 2008 awarded 20% of the baccalaureate degrees earned by Blacks in science and engineering (National Science Foundation, 2011).