Public sector organizations, primarily higher education institutions (HEIs), are facing greater levels of responsibility since adopting and committing to the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development (SD) and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). HEIs are expected to provide guidance for various stakeholders on this matter, but also to implement this agenda and the SDGs in their institutions. Although the role of these organizations has been recognized, the fields and issues that HEIs should address on their path towards sustainability and SD are still unclear. To provide further clarity, a semi-systematic literature review on sustainability and SD in HEIs was conducted to identify both the key concepts and main research themes that represent sustainability and SD in HEIs and to identify research gaps. This review increases our knowledge of this topic and enhances our understanding of sustainability and SD in the context of HEIs.

Industry 5.0 and the associated transformation into Society 5.0 require a complete realignment of the skills required of the engineers of tomorrow. Thereby, the pre-dominant and policy-driven drivers of digitalization, and sustainability in particular, demand a complex variety of enhanced special competencies (e.g., lean thinking, data science skills) and transversal competencies from engineers working in manufacturing companies which must be systematically developed and continuously expanded. Since methodical approaches to systematic competence development in the environment of Industry 5.0-related engineering education are scarce, this article develops a competence profile for industrial logistics engineering education as an example of Industry 5.0-related vocational education and training initiatives. After elaborating on the relevant theoretical aspects of systematic competence development in adult education, an exemplary competence profile for industrial logistics engineering education is developed. Moreover, this paper presents a preliminary investigation of the impact of competencies on job performance and job satisfaction. The research results serve as a basis for the development of new teaching and learning concepts as well as for the investigation of causal relationships between competence-orientation and individual performance for industrial engineers in manufacturing enterprises.

Over the past decades, it has become apparent that increasing demands in the construction industry have repeatedly led to project delays and increased project costs in practice. These demands have increased as a result of international and national action plans that have been developed to achieve the climate target paths and, therefore, the necessary reduction of CO₂ emissions in the construction industry. We address this problem by developing a sustainable construction maturity model (SCOMM) to answer the following research question: “What is a holistic quality assurance tool for the early design phase of buildings to monitor (sustainable) planning practices in order to achieve better certification results?”. The model includes a self-assessment procedure for the building design process, based on Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination (SPiCE) and the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) building certification system. The results show that systemic interactions between sustainability criteria can be identified in the early design phase, allowing the quality of planning practices to be evaluated and early project management to be implemented to achieve the best certification results. Our findings will enable clients and users of the construction industry to better manage the complexity of the sustainable design process and avoid undesirable developments in building projects.

Global supply networks have grown as a result of decades of intensive, strategic outsourcing to firms located in eastern countries. The initially linear supply chains have transformed over time into complex, extensive supply network structures with numerous lower-tier suppliers located all over the world. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has caused bottlenecks in these global supply chains, presenting company supply managers who are responsible for sourcing with enormous challenges. Firms face high risks due to the low levels of transparency and asymmetric divisions of power in their global supply chains, risks that are only heightened by the recent COVID-19 crisis. In this paper, we address this issue by describing the characteristics of critical lower-tier suppliers (CLTS) in practice and scientific literature. The results of this review may serve as an initial framework, guiding researchers in the future as they develop a research model that can be used to explain the success factors of critical lower-tier supplier management in global network structures. Finally, based on these literature review results, this paper provides an overview of perspectives and trends in the management of CLTS in the post-COVID-19 business world.