Equipping Our Undergraduates With Essential Generic Skills For Future Competitiveness: Why, What, When, and How?

Abstract

Generic skills are transferable skills across disciplines, essential for lifelong learning and are applicable in multiple settings. Graduates with such skills are perceived as being more employable and employers expect university education to produce graduates equipped with these skills. In line with the NUS vision of producing future-ready graduates, a survey and discussion forum were conducted with the participation of academic staff from the Department of Biological Sciences (DBS) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) to examine their perceptions regarding the importance of generic skills, whether our undergraduate students were lacking in these skills, and whether academic staff were teaching these skills. While all participants were in agreement that these skills are important, there were mismatches between the academic staff’s perceptions of students lacking these generic skills and their expectations of students learning these skills in the modules they taught. We identified potential teaching and learning challenges of these skills, and further proposed pedagogical solutions and an action plan using an “explicit embedding and bolt-on” approach to address these challenges as well as to enhance the teaching and learning of these essential generic skills to our students.