How universities and employers specify competence in generic skills findings from an analysis of job advertisements

Abstract

The world of Higher Education (HE) uses ‘learning outcomes’ as the usual way of specifying what any particular educational activity is designed to do. They are outcome-based statements of the learning that is occurring in the programme. The learning outcome is also the basis upon which the ‘competence’ of the student is assessed. In technical subjects this assessment is relatively ‘hard’ in that the statement of competence in a topic such as Mathematics is relatively clear to the academic doing the assessment, the student being assessed and employers seeking that competence. The picture is less good when considering generic skills. Here the term “generic skills” is taken to be the same as transferable skills and overlaps considerably with employability skills and lifelong learning skills. This paper reports on one of the findings of a study that is exploring the mismatch in the terminology of generic skills and specifically how employers articulate the level of competence they seek in prospective employees as articulated through job adverts. The paper reports on an analysis of 92 online Biomedical Engineering, Hydro Energy and Solar Power job adverts. A total of 30 unique adjectives were identified including “exposure to” and “familiarity with” to “excellent”, “brilliant”, “impeccable” and “fantastic”. The paper briefly describes the overall research question and sets the work reported in the context of the wider project, defines the methodology being followed and presents the results including how the frequency of adjective usage changes with level of job position in the hierarchy. The conclusion drawn is that there is a gap in the way the competence in generic skills is specified between the supply and demand sides of the employment transition. The paper discusses the justification for a gap as well as the problems this causes.