Learning & Teaching

What is it?

Students take part in a lecture or workshop specifically focused on helping them to identify, understand, articulate and reflect on the disciplinary and future skills that they are developing through their course or wider degree programme.

Without making explicit reference to skill development, students rarely choose to reflect on the skills that they are developing on the course or degree programme as they find it difficult to translate what they learn in the classroom into the appropriate context for them as a graduate after university. Building time into the curriculum for this therefore provides a great way of scaffolding support to consider this.

This lecture or workshop is typically led by a Careers & Employability Manager from Careers, Employability and Opportunity but co-designed with the lecturer leading the course / academic team supporting the degree programme.

How does it work?

The lecturer identifies a need for skills development to be made more explicit to students. For example, to action student feedback, to respond to careers, skills or NSS related data or to help students connect their academic learning with their future.

To ensure that this content is accessible to all students, time should be found within the curriculum as part of a timetabled class. This may be linked to a professional skills course or experiential learning activity – but this is not essential.

As skills have a disciplinary and future focus, the lecturer should contact their College Careers & Employability Manager from Careers, Employability & Opportunity for support in designing this lecture. Together, they can make sure that the skills are related to the academic discipline but are also surfaced in a way that is familiar to employers and related to the graduate labour market.

The first step should be to jointly identify the key skills that are developed in the course or wider degree programme. Then, activities or assessments where students have the chance to acquire, develop or put these skills into action should be highlighted.

When designing the lecture, students may be given the opportunity to:
• Come up with their own list of skills that they think they can develop on the course or throughout their degree programme
• Reflect on their skills development to date through discussion, self-assessment tools or reflective writing
• Hear from students on the programme (e.g., L4 students speaking to L3 students), alumni or employers to contextualise the value of their skills
• Take part in interactive activities to help consolidate their learning

As part of the lecture, students could be tasked with following this up further by completing a skills self-assessment, creating specific skills-related parts of their CV, continuing to log reflection in a learning journal, or creating a personal development plan. This could also be in the form of summative or formative assessment.

Typically, a lecture like this would start with the ‘why’. For example, why skills are important in terms of the UK labour market, why it is often difficult to articulate and reflect on skills and why this kind of input will help students translate what they learn in the classroom into what next after university.

Whilst this kind of lecture can be positioned at the start, midpoint or end of the course or degree programme, it will be most helpful to students as they explore their career options and look to gain experience (i.e., not their final year). This will also give them the chance to put what the learn into practice throughout the rest of their degree.

Does it work?

Surfacing skills through introducing a dedicated skills lecture can help students by:

• Raising awareness of disciplinary and future skills they are already developing
• Recognising the value of the academic curriculum in skills development
• Supporting self-efficacy and confidence
• Helping students to articulate their disciplinary and future skills in reflective assignments and recruitment processes (e.g., CVs, interviews)
• Reinforcing the link between the curriculum and employability / the future
• Acting as a springboard for deeper employability learning across a course of degree programme

Although one input is a great start, regularly surfacing skills through a variety of different formats will help to reinforce this message over time.

What do I need?

• To contact your College Careers & Employability Manager in Careers, Employability & Opportunity
• A clear sense of the disciplinary and future skills developed through your course or as part of the wider degree programme and where these can be acquired, developed or put into action
• A lecture plan with a balance of information, discussion and reflection
• Interactive activities / tasks to encourage reflection

As part of the input, you may also want to consider:

• Getting access to relevant student feedback / data references or is linked to skills (e.g., NSS, Graduate Outcomes etc.)
• Designing a way in which students can continue to think about their skills development (e.g., learning journal, personal development plan)
  • This may also be linked to formative or summative assessment
• How skills can be regularly surfaced through the course / wider degree programme so that this message can be reinforced over time