Your Skills Base

Abstract

There is now a growing emphasis upon the need for postgraduates to develop a credible ‘transferable skills portfolio’ during their time at university, which can be a rather unexpected element of your course. The anxiety felt by some postgraduates about this subject is partly due to the jargon attached to the process of acquiring these skills: ‘experiential learning process’, ‘reflective action planning’, ‘career skills management’ and so on. Once you get beyond the jargon, there are at least two good reasons for paying attention to this aspect of your postgraduate experience. The first is that you will have to employ a variety of differing skills in order to succeed in managing your course, so it is worth ensuring that you hone those skills as you progress so as to make this process easier. The second is that employers are looking for postgraduates who are able to demonstrate these skills (hence the term ‘transferable skills’, that is, those that transfer well into other areas of activity such as employment). This is one development that is driving universities, who are keen to see their postgraduates employed. The good news is that you should not have to do vast amounts of extra work in order to develop an impressive and, as importantly, effective skills base. It is much more a case of formalising and assessing the skills which you already have and then finding ways within your course to develop these in a positive and coherent way.