Push to broaden graduate skills

Climate change, robot workers, popularism ... the world is changing and graduates must be ready for the challenges.

Graduates are entering a more challenging world and need extra skills to cope.

Australian researchers have proposed a set of enhanced graduate attributes that prepare students for a world facing social and political upheavals and technological disruptions in the workplace.

Beverley Oliver, deputy vice-chancellor (education) at Deakin University and her colleague Trina Jorre de St Jorre, say students are “witnessing rising popularism and backlashes against globalisation”, and face climate change challenges that will need interdisciplinary solutions.

Students also will encounter disruptions in the workplace driven by advances in robotics, artificial intelligence and the introduction of “sharing economies”, the researchers say in a new paper published in Higher Education Research and Development.

“The grand challenge of education is to figure out what the successful learner will need … In our turbulent world, the challenge has never been grander, or the urgency as great,” they write.

In their paper Professor Oliver and Dr Jorre de St Jorre identify what universities most often list as their graduate attributes and add suggestions to them.

The enhanced attributes reflect the citizenship and employability skills the world will need in future graduates.

Graduate attributes go beyond discipline areas and often include the soft skills.

One of the attributes universities and non-university higher education providers frequently highlight is global citizenship. Within this attribute providers emphasise that graduates should have “ethical and inclusive engagement with communities, cultures and nations”.

Professor Oliver and Dr Jorre de St Jorre say graduates also need to have an “understanding of history, politics and international relations”.

Providers also emphasise “strong oral and written communication skills”. The researchers add “professional and personal digital safety”.

Forty-one of 42 university websites provide information about their graduate attributes. However, the researchers could find published details of attributes on only 32 of 82 NUHEP sites.

Professor Oliver and Dr Jorre de St Jorre say that while universities have put a great deal of effort into devising their attributes, they still need to be reviewing them on a regular basis to ensure the attributes reflect world and workplace changes.

Professor Oliver told The Australian a major recommendation in the paper was that higher education providers made their graduate attributes more explicit to students.

Although academics listed them on course units, students often did not understand their importance.

She said students often focused on marks and grades as pathways to success and paid less attention to the soft skills that employers prized.

“These are the things that people tell us actually make a difference about who gets the job or who does a better job of the job they get,” Professor Oliver said.

She added that universities still had a lot of work to do in making the graduate attributes real to students.

This could be achieved by having discussions with students about how the graduate attributes would have an impact on the kind of professionals they wanted to become.

But Professor Oliver said discussions needed to go beyond the classroom and that Australia needed to have conversations focusing on the fact not all skills could be captured in marks.

Professor Oliver said that few people asked about marks obtained in bachelor and higher degrees, particularly once graduates had held their degrees for a few years.

Other recommendations in the paper include ensuring that graduate attributes are contextualised and communicated at a course level, in the curriculum, course handbooks and marketing materials, and that more emphasis be placed on critical thinking and problem-solving skills.