Understanding skills: institutional & individual perspectives
John Davies, Carol Shergold, Stuart Lamour & Judith Good
Student perspectives“It’s quite difficult. We don’t say – ‘right, we’re learning this skill and this skill’ we just say we’re writing an essay or doing whatever course - it’s not thought of in terms of skills.”
“I think its quite hard to think about yourself in terms of your skills, especially when writing a CV and trying to sell yourself to employers– if someone asks what skills you’ve got - I don’t know! Like I’m friendly and like can write an essay” “They put it in our course documents, our skills or learning objectives or something, but I don’t think anyone ever reads that, because they all say the same thing.”
A course designer’s perspective…
“When filling out course forms, I tend to cut and paste the
same generic skills from one form to another… lecturers are
asked to provide a set of generic skills which don't "go
anywhere" as it were: there is no requirement for the skills
to be mapped onto the course assessments, nor do they
appear on the course web page.”
Students may ignore
information about
transferrable skills
Staff may copy and paste
information
Need to present credible,
authentic and personalised
skills information
Image from Flickr by Forzagaribaldi licensed under Creative Commons
MethodsUser centred design sessions - views on skills
Card sorting activity - what skills information do students want?
Interviews with careers advisors – views on skills
One-to-one interviews with students – ongoing feedback on prototype
“Woo! It knows things about me – I’m quite amazed !”
“This looks exciting – keywords [..] I can put in all those words you feel stupid for using like ‘team work’ but then you know [that] these are the words they are probably looking for”
“[It] gives me ideas of how I can assert skills better on a CV and mention things I wouldn’t have thought of – [I’d] use it more as a springboard than a copy and paste.” “I think it’s really useful to have these initial headings and ways you can get across you have these skills and not sell yourself short [..] where it came up with all the synonyms of how to describe a skill I think that is really useful and something I would use as well”