Using SkillsMap® with your learners

Learners are developing transferable skills in every subject they study, but they won’t be aware of this unless we tell them. But when we know our subjects through areas of study, rather than through the lens of transferable skills, it can be just as hard for us as educators to find that language ourselves.

At the other extreme, the research behind SkillsMap® surfaced a taxonomy of over 250 different transferable skills, and even the SkillsMap® searchable platform on this website contains around 100 different skills. So articulating a huge number of transferable skills to learners can be pretty overwhelming for educators too!

SkillsMap® can help you identify those skills that you probably instinctively know that you are using as a student and teacher of your subject. It will also give you some richer language for describing groups of skills that often get bundled together, such as ‘analytical’ or ‘communication’ skills. SkillsMap® has been built with Categories and Clusters. While we don’t use that structure directly with learners, it is present in SkillsMap® and it might be a useful tool for you too.

Approaches to using SkillsMap®

If you are considering using SkillsMap® directly with learners, it may also help to read the guidance in the Careers Professionals section on how to use it for the first time in a classroom setting. Though the learning situation might be different, the same approach will be effective.

As part of that or any other learner interaction with SkillsMap® you can use this video with your learners to introduce them to SkillsMap®.

Here are a few other things you could do for and with your learners to introduce transferable skills into your teaching and learning design and delivery:

• When you read syllabus and curriculum documentation, think about the transferable skills required to engage in the activities or areas of study described.
• Which transferable skills do you think are underpinning specialist subject-related skills in your subject area, and might be essential for developing and using that specialist skill?
• How might you introduce a class topic with a transferable skill as well as an area of knowledge? For example, ‘Today’s class is all about weighing up options: how do we choose between different ways to make this calculation?’
• How might you use some of the skills listed in SkillsMap® to help learners recognise when they use them in classwork and homework?
• How might learners describe their subject through the lens of transferable skills rather than knowledge? For example, ‘I like Dance because I’m working with others to figure out how to create a new sequence of moves’ or ‘In Geography, I like that I have to look at the landscape from different points of view to get the whole picture’.

We will be sharing resources for you to use through the site and you can also contact SkillsMap® for an INSET day event for your school or college.

Centralising the learner

Whatever you do as an educator to surface and talk about transferable skills with learners, it will increase learners’ confidence and ability to recognise those skills and use them. And that means that your learners will get more impact from what you are already doing in their education in the short and longer term. That supports and enables even the most disengaged learner to see the value of their education continue into work, whatever they go on to do.

Furthermore, however you use SkillsMap® or talk about transferable skills, it is really important to remember that part of this conversation concerns the learner’s choice of academic subjects. SkillsMap® does not make a case for any subjects being more valuable for future employment than another. On the contrary, SkillsMap® celebrates the diversity of subjects and the huge range of transferable skills that all subjects develop across all disciplines. This is an evidenced fact of the research behind SkillsMap®. Diversity of learning and learners is fundamentally important, both in itself and as a key factor in solving the big and small problems of our future.

So the core takeaway message from SkillsMap® and the research behind it is that all subjects are valuable from an employability point of view. The work we can do as teachers and educators is in helping learners recognise and realise that value while they are learning the subject, and use it to talk more confidently about what their subject learning means in practice, including as they make decisions about their futures. And that enables you, as educators, to get more impact from what you are already doing, without creating something completely new.

Remember, if you love your subject then you’re an expert in the transferable skills your learners are developing too. Loving your subject means that you know it well, so you know instinctively what the transferable skills are that are innate to your subject, even if you don’t often talk about them. SkillsMap® should give you a way to revisit that understanding with your learners.