Understanding skills: institutional & individual perspectives

John Davies, Carol Shergold, Stuart Lamour & Judith Good

(Non-) Digital divides

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

Can we represent transferable skills in an engaging, visual way?

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

What skills information do students want?

Card sorting exercise

Careers advisors expected students to be much further on in their journey

SkillClouds user interface - bridging the divide?

“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”

www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds