Beyond the development of subject-specific skills and knowledge, there is a need for Universities to instill in their students, and nurture throughout their curriculum, a more generic and universal set of ‘transferable’ skills. This project assessed to what extent students in various science schools at the University of Nottingham perceived they had acquired transferable skills throughout their undergraduate and graduate degrees and how relevant to their future career, whether in academia or in the industry, students considered them to be.

A representative list of transferable skills that were particularly applicable to science students was devised and used to design a three-part questionnaire. The first part was designed to rate the extent to which students perceived that those transferable skills had been acquired. The second part evaluated the relative importance that students attached to each of the transferable skills. The final part assessed the extent to which students have been involved in activities that should have lead to them gaining expertise in each of the skill sub-categories. The questionnaire was distributed to final year students, allowing evaluation of skills specifically acquired and developed during their stay at Nottingham, irrespective of their prior experiences and background.

Fifty eight completed questionnaires were obtained from 36 final year undergraduate and 22 Ph. D. students in the following 3 schools: biology, mathematics and psychology. Students perceived that they had moderate to strong ability in most of the represented skills. However, they almost universally felt themselves to be poor at foreign languages, conflict resolution and computer programming. We observed statistically significant differences in reported abilities between undergraduates and graduates in all of the identified broad skill areas. In particular, graduates believe they are better organized, interact better with their peers, and are generally more critical minded when designing experiment or analyzing results. However critical thinking and personal skills were ranked as highly important by all groups. Finally, our analysis highlighted significant differences between schools in only three areas: the use of laboratory equipment where biology students seem unsurprisingly more at ease than the psychology ones, the use of the Internet where, again, more technical minded students report better skills, and reading/writing skills where psychology students deem themselves more skillful.

Encouragingly, it appears that final year science students from the University of Nottingham have developed the majority of the skills necessary to compete efficiently in a fast-changing and increasingly competitive global market. The increased confidence reported by graduate students confirms the positive impact of the University on the development of these skills. However, the strong variations in the extent to which students claimed to have acquired useful skills over the course of their degrees suggest that university experience is not the only contributor. External contributions such as interactions out-with the university and parental education are probably worth investigating.