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This study aims to investigate international students’ cultural adjustment, academic satisfaction and turnover intentions using ecological systems perspective and explores factors that affect academic success and turnover by exploring three stages: arrival, adjustment and adaptation.

The sample consists of 208 international students enrolled at a mid-Western university in the USA. Confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling and mediational analyses were used to test hypotheses.

Findings indicate that self-efficacy, as a pre-sojourn characteristic, affects adjustment variables inclusive of cultural adjustment, affecting academic satisfaction and turnover intentions. Adjustment variables (coping, cultural adjustment and organizational support) mediated relationships between self-efficacy and turnover intentions.

The proposed model moves the research forward by examining an ecological systems framework describing how individual, social, academic, cultural and institutional factors function in supporting international students’ transitions. Results may be generalizable to other large US universities with varying dynamics and resources available (or not) for international students.

Given the challenges international students face in the USA in adapting to both new culture and academic setting, it is imperative to identify what elements of their transition and academic environment predict academic success. This is one of the first studies testing the propositions derived from Schartner and Young’s (2016) model.

Academic buoyancy refers to a student’s adaptive response to overcome common academic-related stress and challenges. Guided by social cognitive theory, we investigated the relation between students' academic buoyancy and their endorsement of compassionate and uncompassionate self-responding.

Students from a Minority-serving, Hispanic-serving public university (N = 112) completed an online survey assessing academic buoyancy (Martin and Marsh, 2008) and self-compassion (Neff, 2003). We conducted a hierarchical regression analysis with uncompassionate and compassionate self-responding as predictors and academic buoyancy as the outcome.

Compassionate self-responding (i.e. self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness) explained additional variance above and beyond what uncompassionate self-responding (i.e. self-judgment, isolation and overidentification) explained in the model. Uncompassionate self-responding components emerged as the strongest predictors of academic buoyancy.

Limited research exists regarding the relation between self-compassion and academic buoyancy, especially in the higher education setting. This research indicates that student compassionate self-responding is associated with students’ adaptive response to overcoming academic setbacks, stress and challenges. The findings of the current research could have meaningful implications for university officials’ efforts in helping students overcome academic-related setbacks and achieve academic success in higher education. University offices, programs and communities can focus on compassionate self-responding to support students in overcoming common school-related setbacks. Programs could be developed to move students away from uncompassionate self-responding as a means of promoting buoyancy.

This paper seeks to examine workplace learning strategies, learning facilitators and learning barriers of public accountants in Canada across three professional levels – trainees, managers, and partners.

Volunteer participants from public accounting firms in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick completed a demographic survey, a learning activities survey, a learning barriers survey, and a learning facilitators survey. Quantitative analysis provided total scores for key variables and compared these across the three levels.

The paper finds that accountants across different levels use a variety of formal and informal learning strategies, although informal strategies predominate. Accountants encounter numerous facilitators and barriers. There are variations in strategies, barriers and facilitators based on professional level; for example, trainees make more use of e‐learning than do either managers or partners.

Future research could focus on the efficacy of accountants' formal and informal learning strategies as well as how e‐learning can be appropriately managed and utilized.

Allocation of work and relationships with people are important to the learning process and should be considered in work assignments. One implication is to encourage informal learning and provide appropriate learning activities and feedback so that informal learning is maximized. There could also be more emphasis placed on assisting partners and managers in developing their roles as coaches and mentors.

The paper provides information on workplace learning for an understudied group of professionals in a Canadian context.