Twelve tips for teaching twelve transferable skills

Abstract

There is an increasing awareness of the importance of transferable skills. With the internet now allowing almost instant access to information, the recall of factual knowledge no longer has the primacy it has held for centuries. In contrast, transferable skills remain particularly important for medical students because they receive a generic education in preparation for a diverse range of careers. The twelve tips in this article are more relevant for certain skills than others. Transferable skills should be taught in context and students should be made aware of how the skills will play a part in their future. Learning outcomes must be made clear to both staff and students, and without clear assessment of transferable skills students are likely to focus exclusively on knowledge. Students and staff should proactively engage with transferable skills training, rather than taking a purely remedial approach.

‘Everyone is trying to outcompete each other’: a qualitative study of medical student attitudes to a novel peer‐assessed undergraduate teamwork module

“…Our use of authentic clinical placements has, in line with others' findings, helped students develop their understanding of the transferability of teamwork to various contexts [17,29,30]. Our students have also demonstrated more detailed, personal descriptions of teamwork in different settings following the module.…”

“…Much of European education is knowledge-based, with examinations from school onwards testing retention of facts rather than skills and problem-solving. This is partly historical, but it may also be because testing facts is more straightforward than testing transferable skills [4,16,17]. In addition, some educators assume that teamwork and other skills are acquired automatically through group work.…”

“…The effectiveness of teamwork education can be increased by making it authentic and relevant to the students and their future careers [17,29,30]. Placements can demonstrate to the students how essential these skills are in the real world, and reflecting on these experiences further reinforces learning and helps students identify areas they need to develop [1,31,32].…”

The Mismatch Between Neuroscience Graduate Training and Professional Skill Sets

“…While these differences may reflect the fact that more "soft skills" are required in the advanced stages of all careers, they also underscore the importance of these skills across career paths, and suggest that we should be training our graduates in these domains (Succi & Canovi, 2019). While others have noted the necessity of providing graduates with transferable skills such as being able to learn in groups and communication (e.g., Canelas et al, 2017;Scott et al, 2017, Watson & Burr, 2018, here, we provide evidence for this need specifically for careers of students with neuroscience degrees.…”

Improving communication for learning with students: expectations, feedback and feedforward

“…Map how each module informs those that follow it in terms of both the timing and nature of the feedback that is produced. In order to achieve this, it is necessary for teachers to be clear about the transferable skills associated with their topics ( Watson & Burr, 2018 ). It is very easy for teachers to be conscious only of the specifics of their discipline and be relatively unaware of the general lessons that they teach.…”