Developing the learner-earner journey and bridging the digital skills gap
Authors
The project team led by Northumbria University, in partnership with Abertay University, Cardiff University, London Metropolitan University, Ulster University, University of Bath, University of Huddersfield, and University of York, was thrilled to secure one of the prestigious QAA-funded Collaborative Enhancement Projects. This significant initiative, launched in early 2024, aims to explore the pressing issue of the digital skills gap.
First steps
A worldwide skills gap exists between employer expectations/graduate attainments and corresponding higher-than-ideal graduate unemployment and underemployment. Our project addresses the skills gap by exploring Student, Graduate and Employer Viewpoints. Firstly, we explore how graduates obtain professional employment. Secondly, we explore the match between the competencies gained via degree study and those required in employment.
We began the project by agreeing on an ethics protocol and designing a series of online workshops with our key stakeholder groups to be delivered using Microsoft Teams and exploiting the Miro platform. If you have not explored Miro previously, you may want to take a look. It provides a dynamic, collaborative presentation and whiteboarding platform which integrates well with other collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams or Zoom.
Workshop design
The workshop is delivered in five sections:
- We introduce the project and what we are trying to achieve, pause for questions, and seek aural consent to participate in the research.
- We capture pen sketches so that we can refer to attendees anonymously in future outputs. In this case, the pen sketch includes first name, job title, type of organisation, career specialism, and organisation size.
- The first part of the workshop proper is a foresight activity in the sense that it is a systematic attempt to look into the long term. In this, we visualise the ideal transition from studying at university to professional employment. The activity design is the Catapult Futurespective. In the Catapult Futurespective workshop, participants are asked to visualise the transition from university to professional employment as a giant human catapult (the university) that shoots graduates over mountains (risks/challenges) into Nirvana (employment). The workshop also addresses the desired in-air support to overcome the difficulties and employers' mechanisms to support the transition into the workplace. This playful approach is employed to promote unconstrained thinking.
- We then explore skills gaps regarding professional/soft skills. We use SFIA behavioural factors as a model here.
- Finally, we explore skills gaps in terms of technical skills, using SFIA role families as the basis for this. We focus on the skill families most appropriate to our graduates, i.e. Software engineering, Information and Cybersecurity, Business Analysis, Technology Infrastructure Platform Support (e.g. classical IT Tech work), Application Support (e.g. support and maintenance for civil service applications or manufacturing systems, etc.), Data Science – and we could not resist asking about Artificial Intelligence!
Challenges
Alumni schemes are in place at all the partner universities. These schemes have been centralised, partly to comply with data protection legislation. Consequently, the closeness of contact between academic departments and alumni may be less than ideal.
While central alumni teams have supported the project, encouraging participation through LinkedIn and similar platforms has not been especially successful. Participant recruitment from personal contacts and social media profiles has been more successful. However, we are conscious that this may make the sampling less inclusive. The project's intention was different, but the work-to-date suggests it would be timely to explore the alumni links that departments maintain, how to meet data protection expectations, and how both parties can benefit from extending them. In future projects, it may also be worth considering what would be an appropriate incentive to encourage graduates to participate.
Early outcomes
The information gathered from the workshops is rich. To date, we have run workshops with graduates and the employers of graduates at Northumbria University and London Metropolitan University. We have also run workshops with employers at Ulster University and Abertay University, and we are delighted to welcome Warwick University to the project, extending the project's geographic presence to incorporate the Midlands.
Consideration of the pilot Futurespectives (Prickett, Walters and Yang (2024)) with the participating project partners so far highlights:
- Opportunities to enhance graduates' professional and technical skills, with signposting to specific skill areas (e.g. in-person working and DevOps).
- Both graduates and employers highlight the importance of networking and career-building skills and how graduates can develop them as key factors in obtaining professional employment.
- Graduates also strongly highlighted the importance of organisational socialisation, i.e., induction and onboarding processes, which are critical to graduates' transition.
- There is some pessimism about the current Tech job market. There are reports of potential over-expansion of some parts of the Tech Industry over the pandemic and related adjustments in some sectors (e.g. games). It is also unclear what the impact of AI will be on some Tech roles (e.g. programming).
- There is potential for collaboration and enhancement projects. The willingness of industrialists to visit universities to provide guest lectures, support hackathons, and so on is always highly welcomed and appreciated by students.
Where next?
Workshops will continue across the other partner institutions in 2025, and it is exciting to see what general outcomes will emerge!