DEADLINE EXTENDED!!
What is increasingly required is work-ready intelligence.
In this special issue, work-ready intelligence is understood as a graduate’s capacity to exercise sound human judgement, ethical accountability, and adaptive learning while working within technology-rich and AI-enabled organizational systems. It includes the ability to frame real-world problems, adapt to complexity, collaborate with people and intelligent tools, evaluate outputs and decisions, navigate uncertainty, and keep learning in motion as technologies, roles, and expectations continually evolve.
This special issue assumes that graduates are increasingly entering workplaces mediated by advanced technologies, including generative AI, and asks how applied learning develops the human judgement, accountability, and adaptability required to work effectively in those contexts. With polytechnics and applied institutions acting as catalysts, co-builders, and trusted partners, how are learners being prepared not simply to use tools, but to think, decide, and contribute responsibly within dynamic social and technical workplace contexts?
We invite submissions that move beyond making applied learning visible to critically examining how applied learning cultivates work-ready intelligence in practice. Contributions may focus on innovative designs, pragmatic approaches, and future-focused strategies that prepare learners for impact in workplaces where advanced technologies are becoming increasingly integral to daily work.
Advanced technologies, including generative AI, are a welcome and encouraged topic in your manuscripts, but they should not be the main character. Instead, authors are invited to examine how learners develop the capacity to engage thoughtfully, ethically, and effectively with evolving roles, tools, data, and systems across disciplines, including the trades, engineering, mathematics, health, applied sciences, professional fields, creative industries, and so forth.
Scope (submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following areas):
- Developing Work-Ready Intelligence: How applied learning can support the development of judgement, accountability, problem framing, adaptation to complexity, and continuous learning in technology-rich and AI-enabled work contexts.
- Pathways for Learners: Fresh approaches to capstones, applied research projects, programs, courses, work placements, international study experiences, or cocurricular initiatives that go beyond participation in real-world tasks to intentionally surface decision making, responsibility, complexity, and learning under uncertainty. Submissions should make clear how these pathways develop learners’ capacity to exercise judgement and adapt within evolving work systems, rather than simply describing experiential activities.
- Applied Learning in Real Work Systems: Case studies that clearly connect experiential learning to actual job roles, tools, responsibilities, productivity, quality, and decision making within contemporary workplaces shaped by advanced technologies.
- From Pilot to Practice: Initiatives that have moved from experimentation to sustained practice, with attention to impact, outcomes, organizational learning, and potential for scalability.
- Advanced Technology-Enabled Practice: Thoughtful and ethical engagement with AI, big data, automation, extended reality, simulation, robotics, drones, digital platforms, or other advanced technologies as part of work and learning environments.
- Capability and Confidence Building: Peer learning and collaborative approaches that encourage learners to test ideas, learn from failure, adapt to changing tools, and build confidence in complex and evolving work contexts.
- Partnerships and Co-Creation: Relevant collaborations with industry, small and medium-sized enterprises, community and public sector organizations, Indigenous partners, or international partners, including COIL and other virtual exchanges, that extend applied learning beyond the classroom and borders in reciprocal and responsible ways.
Submissions
Manuscripts should be submitted through JIPE’s portal and follow the JIPE Submission Toolkit for templates, references, figures, tables, and accessibility requirements. Activities involving human participants require REB approval (or a clear justification in line with institutional policy).
Reviewer Focus and Expectations
Submissions to this special issue will be reviewed with particular attention to how clearly they advance understanding of work-ready intelligence for complex and evolving contexts. Reviewers will look beyond descriptive accounts of applied or experiential learning activities to examine how manuscripts surface learners’ development of judgement, accountability, adaptation to complexity, and decision-making within real-world systems.
Strong submissions will make explicit what learners were required to navigate, decide, or take responsibility for, how advanced technology and changing roles shaped the work context, and what evidence demonstrates growth in work-ready intelligence. Manuscripts that move from activity description to analytical insight, reflection, and transferable learning will be especially well aligned with the aims of this special issue.
Disclosure
Authors are asked to disclose where and how automated tools were used in the research or writing process, including translation, analysis, or copyediting, in accordance with emerging responsible use guidelines. (Stay tuned for JIPE’s policy on responsible AI use.)
Key Dates
- 300-word abstract or proposal due: April 15, 2026
- Full manuscripts due: July 15, 2026
- Peer review decisions and revisions completed by: October 15, 2026
- Final revisions completed by: November 15, 2026
- Publication window: December 15, 2026
Download the "Beyond Skills: Building Work-Ready Intelligence" Call for Papers.