The key issues underpinning this article are increasing globalization, development and expansion of the European Union, and the ease of and demand for international travel. These factors collectively are generating greater numbers of international travellers and thus an increasing recognition of the need for multilingual staff. This is perhaps most manifest in the service industries and, it is argued, particularly in tourism. The availability of multilingual staff is, partly at least, a function of education. This article examines the role and position of foreign languages skills in undergraduate tourism management degree courses. The findings of an investigation into the attitudes and perceptions of students of such courses in relation to the study of foreign languages are presented, complemented by the outcomes of a survey of tourism employers. While it is established that the development of foreign languages skills is recognized as an invaluable outcome of these courses, it is surprising that their acquisition is not always compulsory. Limitations in the study of languages are identified as well as key differences between the perceptions of students and those of employers, which highlight critical issues and the need for further research.

Prior employment imprints nascent entrepreneurs with logics for organizing startups. Within a regional ecosystem, entrepreneurs with different employment backgrounds pursue alternative entrepreneurial pathways, each generating distinct, though complementary, regional impacts. By analyzing diverse pre-entrepreneurial employment experiences, no one pathway leads to superior firm performance; prior industry experience generates strong early performance that tapers off, while prior academic experience engenders slow, steady, long-lasting growth. Our approach is well-suited for theorizing ecosystem development and generating policy recommendations in support of ecosystem diversity.

Economic development strategies often target high-skill and high-wage industries and occupations, but the relationship between skills and wages is uneven and complicated. This study offers a skill-centered, industry-level overview of this uneven landscape. Familiar data sources (input–output tables, industry–occupation matrices, and occupational skill profiles) are used to analyze skill demand across the U.S. automotive cluster. The author shows that the automotive industry depends on the high-level manufacturing skills of intermediate goods suppliers and highlights that the lower wages in these and lower-tier supply sectors may impede skill regeneration and upgrading. Economic and workforce development practitioners can use this analysis to begin or reinvigorate skill-centric conversations with employers in high- and low-skill sectors. Industry leaders can use it to demonstrate the extent to which larger firms rely on the skills of their supply network and to motivate investments in skill development across the supply chain.

This article utilizes a unique database (PLACE, the PLatform for Advancing Community Economies) to explore relationships between founders’ prior work experiences and the outcomes of their entrepreneurial firms. The authors capture and compare multiple, intersecting, often overlapping, prior work experiences and assess their differential interactions within a local ecosystem. They augment existing empirical research, which has looked most closely at the impact of prior employment on firm financing and survival, to include labor market effects. Results show important differences in firm-level employment outcomes across prior work experiences, with an advantage accruing to founders with prior work experience in local life science firms.

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