Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine whether soft skill requirements found in employer job postings (advertisements) within different roles of business are similar to the soft skills practically needed in the workplace and the perception of faculties at schools of business in Bangladesh. Design/methodology/approach A two-phased study was administered. Phase 1 involved reviewing the latest relevant literature and hundreds of job advertisements; and in phase 2, questionnaires were administered to elicit responses from executives and faculty members from different universities in Bangladesh. Judgment sampling and the snowball technique were used to develop the sample of 84 respondents with a response rate of 56 percent. In total, 15 soft skills were used to develop the instrument. Descriptive statistics and a Kruskal–Wallis test were performed to analyze the collected data, where factors that retained α at or below 0.05, a family-wise Bonferroni adjustment (Mann–Whitney U test) was applied. Findings All the mentioned soft skills are found to be desirable by the recruiters and faculties also agreed with them. However, there exist disparities on the perceived importance of four soft skills among faculties and recruiters, and a gap was found between the business curriculum and industry expectations from fresh-out business graduates. Originality/value This study could be a basis for future studies and would help business education institutions guide their students to master the skills, and to develop and prepare them for real life battle in the job market. Moreover, the study indicates the gap between executives’ expectations from the graduates and the institutional teaching provided by higher education institutions (for business majors), which would help practitioners reform their business curriculum to better ensure employability for their business graduates. Moreover, the study opens an avenue for further research in this field for implementing training programs for attaining the most desired soft skills among higher education institutions.

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Employee welfare is an area of social welfare, which covers a broad field of Corporate Sustainability and connotes a state of well-being, happiness, satisfaction, conservation and development of human resources. Evidences from contemporary literature suggest that employee welfare contributes to the sustainability of the business significantly. This paper is based on descriptive and inferential research. This study has tried to measure the extent to which the garments industries in Chittagong city of Bangladesh are providing their employees (plant level) with welfare facilities. The findings of this study suggests that most of the sample farms offer welfare benefits to their employees and such benefits have improved the productivity and sustainability of the business. The study also opens avenue for further research in this field considering employee welfare reporting as a tool for corporate sustainability in the developing counties.

Human values and affective traits were found to predict attitudes toward the use of different types of knowledge-based theory through creative climate. In this study (N =329), we aimed to gain a more comprehensive understanding of those predictors toward use in a structural equation model (SEM), providied a better overview of a possible structural path that drives to such antecedents for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Bangladesh. Precisely, we predicted and found that the relations between the variables and impact of different variables were modeled and tested by applying SEM. Based on the questionnaires survey on SMEs in Bangladesh, this empirical study indicates that all the predictor variables significantly influence the endogenous variables except knowledge management (KM) and employee resilience (ER), and creative climate (CC) and organizational resilience (OR). The study provides several theoretical and practical implications for further research.

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