Right Tracks--Wrong Rails: The Development of Generic Skills in Higher Education.

Abstract

Higher education is being encouraged to provide the graduates needed by commerce and industry in order to ensure economic development and enhance competitiveness. Throughout Europe and America, recent findings indicate that employers show a preference for teamwork, communication, and self-skilIs above knowledge, degree classification, intelligence, and reputation of the institution the graduate attended. Progressively less emphasis on traditional degrees and more on the validation of competence is clearly discernible. But the question persists: Are our higher education institutions meeting the challenge? Employing a large-scale extensive questionnaire, this study explores student and academic staff views within a higher education institution in the U.K. Results indicate that while staff and students ascribe equal importance to key generic skills, they differ in their views of the extent to which a number of such skills are currently being developed through course content. It is time for higher education to address explicitly the issue of the place of transferable skis in the curriculum. This problem is not unique to Europe. Indeed, the need for a concerted effort by teachers and policymakers in higher education to help rebuild American workforce competence has been repeatedly highlighted. Development work in this area should be a priority.