A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Teaching and learning for employability
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• acquire complex information from a variety of sources and think creatively about
and build complex systems.
(Higher Education Academy, 2006: 102)
Asking students to evidence concepts from their experience will help to build confidence
in their abilities.
The Employability Profiles are equally relevant for students on vocational degrees.
Dentistry has 12 bullet points but only one is directly related to clinical practice. All the
others are competencies which can be expected of any graduate, for example:
• exercise initiative and personal responsibility;
• use IT for communication, data collection and analysis and for self-directed learning;
• analyse and resolve problems and deal with uncertainty;
• manage time, set priorities and work to prescribed time limits.
(Higher Education Academy 2006: 68)
Case study 1: Developing awareness
Here is a tutorial activity. To focus attention, ask students to explain, in a
curriculum vitae or interview, the qualities, skills and experiences they have to
offer to employers as a graduate of their own discipline.
Interrogating practice
How does the Employability Profile for your discipline appear in your
undergraduate student handbook, on departmental websites, and in preuniversity
promotional materials?
DEVELOPING CONSCIOUS AWARENESS
OF SKILLS AND ATTRIBUTES
An unaware student might explain that the absence of presentations from their
curriculum vitae (CV), despite having given upward of 25 presentations to groups of five
to 60 people, is because ‘they don’t count, they are just university presentations’.
Experience shows that unless they are prompted (Case study 1), students concentrate on
recounting their knowledge at the expense of appreciating that they have also acquired
skills in data interpretation, project management, development of structured documents,
and independent and critical thinking.