Range Of Employability Skills Research Articles

A Note on Structuring Employability Skills for Accounting Students

The development of soft and technical skills as part of tertiary education courses is key to enhancing the employability skills of graduating students. Within the accounting profession there is little agreement over which skills should be developed and a wide range have been suggested as relevant. A sample (n = 62) of higher education educators and industry practitioners were surveyed to elicit their assessments of the importance of a range of employability skills. Exploratory Factor Analysis was used to group the skills into six factors that helped to provide a better understanding of the skills and how they could be grouped for teaching purposes

TMI - Too Much Information: Creating Employability Skills Resources - enabling students to develop an effective interface with a client

Employers from a range of disciplines have commented on the problem of weaning graduates from the behaviours instilled in them by the typical assessment process. When asked to give advice, information is usually correct but too often goes beyond what is needed by the client, thus giving the client TMI - too much information. As part of a project examining a range of employability skills a resource has been created to address this particular issue, which comprises audiovisual files illustrating four different contexts (housing, health, IT and education) with accompanying teaching notes. Students are encouraged to put themselves in the place of the client and recognise the difference between being told the 'textbook' response and receiving relevant advice. This paper examines the creation of the resources and evaluates the perceived value of their use in the classroom.

Undergraduate design learning in multiple partnerships: joinedupdesign for academies

This article reports research into undergraduate design learning through an off-campus partnership. The Sorrell Foundation’s Joinedupdesign for Academies programme involved partnerships between university design departments, ‘failing’ 11–18 schools and professional designers, in the context of a funding commitment to rebuild/renew school buildings in the UK, and an ideological commitment to remodel schools as ‘Academies’. We investigated the impact on 12 undergraduate Design students’ learning as they partnered pupils at two secondary schools in a live regeneration project, following both schools’ redesign/relaunch as ‘Academies’. Using a mixed methods case study approach, we report the acquisition of a wide range of employability skills, vital for professional designers, through an innovative learning model in which pupils act as clients. In terms of design education, these partnerships provided a rare and authentic exposure to the complex demands of publicly-funded work for undergraduate design students, and as such offer a new and potentially interesting model for experiential design education, which bridges campus and off-campus learning.