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This research explores human factors practices in the context of Industry 4.0, Industry 5.0 and the multigenerational workforce, promoting the evolution of Human Capital 4.0. With the emergence of generations Y and Z, organizations are more volatile, heightening the risk of tacit knowledge loss. Conditions conducive to retaining employees must be created, particularly by prioritizing engagement initiatives.

Addressing these imperatives required the adoption of a comprehensive mixed-methods methodology, which integrated a systematic literature review, a qualitative thematic analysis of 30 interviews conducted with employees from three multinational organizations and a quantitative statistical analysis of a questionnaire gathering 560 responses.

The study identifies essential practices for enhancing employee well-being, considering blue and white collars, using the PERMA model. It recommends adopting corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and flexible work arrangements to improve positive emotion. Engagement is strengthened by aligning roles with employee strengths, offering ongoing learning opportunities and incorporating gamification. Strong Relationships are fostered through coaching, mentoring and participatory decision-making. Meaning in work is supported by encouraging a protean career attitude and integrating CSR activities to align personal and professional values. Accomplishment is achieved through lean management principles and recognition programs that facilitate goal achievement and employee appreciation.

This is the first multigenerational study to include Gen Z, both blue- and white-collar workers and the PERMA model, offering a set of practices designed to improve Human Capital 4.0 retention. These practices target adaptation to both the digital paradigm and the multigenerational environment as well as addressing the phenomena of the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting.

Information and communication technologies brought a new paradigm that allows policymakers to ground their actions on real-time events. Smart cities were initially conceived as a technological vision separate from urban planning. As a result, projects were rarely connected between departments, objectives were not aligned with strategic goals and there was a lack of citizen participation. This study aims to propose a framework to guide and support the design and implementation of a smart city.

Interviews with eight policymakers and one secretary of state are conducted to explore current decision-making processes, specifically, to understand if and how smart city strategies are designed and who their main contributors are. Based on these findings, an inductive thematic analysis of existing literature studies to inspire the steps of the proposed framework is performed. Finally, these steps are discussed in a focus group with nine smart city experts to characterize the guidelines comprehensively.

Policymakers confirmed the lack of a standard method and approach to orient their smart city strategies. Results describe a flexible, participatory framework that envisions 12 steps divided into 4 phases with dedicated guidelines.

This paper integrates the plan-do-check-act cycle approach into the thinking for urban planning design. In addition, it raises the need to reflect on the definition of a country’s strategic plan and the alignment and execution of cities’ roadmaps.

Graduates’ employability has been recognised as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon in the theoretical literature. However, some critics have emerged around the lack of relation between structural, contextual and individual dimensions that have been acknowledged as relevant for the understanding of graduates’ employability. This study aims to map empirical research, grounded on a scoping and integrative review of the research published to date on the determinants of graduates’ employability and offer a wider perspective of the knowledge produced across different disciplinary fields, and theoretical and methodological approaches.

Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses protocol for Scoping Reviews, a systematic and extensive search of the literature was carried out and 74 studies focusing on the determinants of graduates’ employability were selected through inclusion and exclusion criteria. Then, data were extracted, analysed and interpreted with quantitative and qualitative techniques.

The results evidence that multiple factors mainly related to higher education attributes, educational arrangement, personal and interpersonal attributes, and socioeconomic conditions predict the odds of obtaining a job after graduation. This review also demonstrates some fragmentation of knowledge produced in this field and identifies a lack of an integrative approach, calling for more multidisciplinary research that might favour a more comprehensive knowledge of graduates’ employability.

By considering the different factors together, from individual and contextual levels, the present review offers an original and clearer overall picture of what is currently known and what is still unresearched about the determinants of graduates’ employability.