Can you teach transversal skills to higher education students— and make them recognizable?
Transversal skills are not easily defined. This makes them difficult to teach but also to recognize and demonstrate. And by the way, what are transversal skills exactly? I will report a definition used by UNESCO to clarify:
Transversal skills are those typically considered as not specifically related to a particular job, task, academic discipline or area of knowledge but as skills that can be used in a wide variety of situations and work settings.
Building on UNESCO’s definition, the main categories of transversal skills we can identify are:
- Critical, innovative and creative thinking
- Inter-personal skills (such as presentation and communication
skills, organizational skills, teamwork, emotional intelligence, etc.) - Intra-personal skills (such as self-discipline, enthusiasm, perseverance, self-motivation, patience, resilience etc.)
- Global citizenship (such as tolerance, openness, respect for
diversity, intercultural understanding, etc.) - Media and information literacy such as the ability to locate and access information, as well as to analyse and evaluate media content.
That makes for quite a lot of competences, abilities, attitudes and in some cases almost character traits. Teaching hard, well-defined competences and knowledge is already a challenge, so it makes sense to wonder whether teaching or training these soft skills is even possible at all. But let’s take a step back first and understand why they are so important — and increasingly so.
Why are they increasingly important?
Possessing transversal skills can have an extensive positive impact on an individual’s life: both professional and personal. It is easy to see why just by looking at the examples listed above. The point is that their importance is increasing, along with the ongoing industrial transformations that are changing the way we live and work. Every new technology always brings new skills and competences to be acquired in order to use it and benefit from it. But the Fourth Industrial Revolution we are currently experiencing is bringing about changes as fast as ever before. As Klaus Schwab (World Economic Forum) puts it:
The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent. […] And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance. […] possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.
And therefore people will increasingly interact with increasingly smart systems and machines. Apart from an increasing demand for digital and technological skills in the workplace, transversal skills are becoming more and more important as they are inherently human, and cannot be easily replaced by machines as it is the case with hard, technical skills. McKinsey’s research on the topic finds that between 2016 and 2030, demand for social and emotional skills will grow across all industries by 26 percent in the United States and by 22 percent in Europe.
Teaching transversal skills in higher education
And so the next logical question is: how do we acquire this type of skills and can they be taught? Of course there are no degrees on critical thinking or emotional intelligence, and we may think that transversal skills cannot really be taught: we rather acquire them by going through a series of situations and informal learning experiences in life, sometimes without even realizing it. For example by reading 50 books in a year instead of 1, your ability to think critically and creatively may improve. A trip to some new and unknown place in the world may impact your global citizenship skills, by increasing your respect for diversity or intercultural understanding. Surely you can think of many other personal examples.
Higher-education does however have a responsibility towards people’s success in life and in the workplace. If transversal skills are becoming more and more important, a well functioning higher-education system should make sure that those who go through education are equipped with those skills. As I have already discussed in my previous article, there are different ways through which Universities could try to boost students’ transversal skills, including:
- by encouraging them (and allowing the time) to carry out certain types of extra-curricular activities that foster informal learning;
- by re-designing teaching methodologies in class to allow more cooperative, interactive and reality-based learning.
I believe that most transversal skills cannot be taught directly. The ability to think critically or to be emotionally intelligent cannot really be developed based on ad-hoc courses on the subject. While some soft skills — such as presentation and communication skills — could also be trained through ad hoc “modules”, most of the others can be trained indirectly by providing the right frameworks and opportunities.
How do you make them recognizable?
If higher-education manages to teach or train, although indirectly, and transmit the right transversal skills to its students, the question is how to make them recognizable to employers.
On the one hand, employers can adopt recruiting strategies that allow candidates to demonstrate their transversal skills. Very often recruitment is solely based on candidates’ technical skills, knowledge and academic background through one or more standard interviews that do not focus the attention on the person’s soft skills. However, the latter often provide a more accurate prediction of a candidate’s real fit for the position. They can already be partly assessed by asking certain questions during an interview, and through tools such as psychometric tests — to gauge a candidate’s behavior and mental aptitude — or solving case studies. Some organisations also use assessment centres to evaluate inter-personal and team work abilities.
On the other hand, if transversal skills acquired through the different informal learning experiences a student undertakes prior to entering the labour market could receive a formal recognition, i.e. an external validation, employers could spend less time figuring out how to design a recruitment process that evaluates those skills, thus reducing hiring friction and costs. For example, a student may participate in a team project in class for a company. That same company could provide a final evaluation of the work that includes a formal evaluation of the main soft skills trained and demonstrated through the completion of that project. The same student may also participate in some extra-curricular activity such as volunteering for an organisation, after which the organisation could provide a formal evaluation of the skills demonstrated. And so on… The student would be able to finish studies with a portfolio of externally validated projects and activities in addition to a standard academic record, making it easier for recruiters to assess the candidate’s fit and for the candidate to show its real worth.
The European Institutions have recognized the importance of validating non-formal and informal learning. The 2012 Council recommendation on validation of non-formal and informal learning promoted a more systematic approach to validation to increase the visibility and value of learning taking place outside formal education and training systems. Together with Cedefop, guidelines on how to validate formal and informal learning have been issued in 2015 and the European inventory on validation of non-formal and informal learning provides an overview of validation practices and arrangements across Europe. The overarching principle is that “learning from whatever source has a value — so it needs to be validated” to allow better matching of skills with labour demand and also improve the transferability of skills between companies and sectors. However, the skills validated through these systems are mostly technical skills — see for example the Belgian Titre de compétence (skills certificate). Although this is also a very important element to make sure that all types learning experiences become an official part of a person’s CV, it does not solve the issue of validation of transversal skills.
AEGEE, Europe’s biggest students’ organisation, carried out a survey among students and graduates. It turns out that only 15,4% of respondents say that skills and competences learned in non-formal education are recognised by their university, while 83,7% of them want the university to recognise them (in terms of certificates or credit points). Furthermore 39% of them doesn’t feel prepared for the job they want, of which 66% says it is because university is too theoretical and is too far from the “real world”. This all indicates that the need is real. To respond to this need, efforts to validate skills and competences acquired through non-formal and informal learning should increase and could start including transversal skills as well — to help in the assessment of the latter among university graduates. But they have to go hand in hand with efforts to expose students to more non-formal, informal and experiential learning opportunities that allow them to feel closer to the “real world” and develop those transversal skills that will be increasingly high in demand.
