Students’ experience and perception of skills development – are we helping or hindering or just misplacing our efforts to engage students?
Tuesday, April 8, 2025 2:30 PM - 3:15 PM
ENGAGEMENT
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Session Outline
This presentation will outline work over the last six months at the University of Bristol exploring how students engage with skills development. To what extent do they see it as a curricular, co-curricular or extracurricular activity? Underpinning this is the hope to better understand how students engage with the support and opportunities provided by the University, eg. through personal tutoring, and if they don’t, why not?
A key element of the University’s vision is to ensure that students gain the future skills needed to thrive in a changing world. And understanding the extent to which students see this as something that happens because of, in spite of, or outside of their programmes of study and wider university provision is more important now than ever, in the face of continuing questions about the value of a university education. And perhaps we can strengthen the connection between students’ experiences and their development by better understanding the barriers that prevent them from engaging with developmental opportunities and help them to overcome these barriers.
This project was undertaken by students in collaboration with the Bristol Institute for Learning and Teaching (BILT) and the University’s Careers Service. To make sure the student voice was truly represented 2 Student Fellows conducted five faculty-specific focus groups with UG and PG students, followed by a short survey to gauge engagement with specific skills development.
In this presentation, we will look at some of the preliminary findings on what students had to say about how they see their skills development, what stops them, and what might help. We ran a thematic analysis of the transcripts from the focus groups and the responses to the short survey shine a light on the extent to which students see skills development as an extracurricular or curricula/ co-curricular activity.
In the focus groups, students often talked about skills development as a process towards personal self-growth that highlighted the challenge of providing a generalised institutional support to something that is often very personal or disciplinary-specific. And this personal level is often where students situated the most significant barriers - such as managing their time or lacking self-confidence. But also, rather than a disconnect coming from the perception of a lack of skills development opportunities, many spoke about being overwhelmed by choice and not knowing where to start. Perhaps the barriers lie not within the skills development provision itself but how we help our students to navigate it.
We will also present some of the initial actions we are taking following the findings and recommendations of this project such as a series of student co-creation activities that will seek to promote and support both student and staff engagement with skills development and how both groups are able to navigate this vital aspect of the student experience that is often more complicated than it seems.
Learning Outcomes
reflect on the ways their students engage with their institutions' skills development provision.
Identify opportunities to enhance the provision of skills development provision particularly through how it is aligned with co-curricular activities such as personal tutoring
Competencies
This session addresses the following competencies of the UKAT Professional Framework for Advising and Tutoring