Embedding Skills – A Disciplinary Challenge

The Exeter Skills Framework challenges us to surface the skills required to achieve on our programmes, as well as presenting an opportunity to develop a curriculum that marries disciplinary rigour with the development of transferrable skills designed to launch students into wide-ranging futures. In this blog, Associate Professor Annabel Watson reports on findings from an Education Incubator project which scoped staff views of the skills required to be successful in their disciplines, revealing implications for how we embed skills development in teaching and assessment.

The Skills to Thrive

The skills required to thrive personally, academically and in employment are constantly changing. The idea that education is ‘preparing young people for jobs that don’t yet exist’ has become something of a truism (e.g. British Council, n.d.) thrust to the forefront of public discourse about the current and future potential of Artificial Intelligence (Wiliam, n.d.).

Work on the Exeter Skills Framework (ESF) is challenging us to acknowledge ever more explicitly that our curriculum is multi-purpose: we are developing students’ disciplinary expertise and identities, helping them to acquire the skills to become a geographer or physicist, lawyer or nurse, but also preparing them for alternative future careers and future selves. This can be seen in the very broad and multidimensional definition of ‘skills’ in the ESF – encompassing what might variously be called attributes, competencies, abilities or attitudes as much as skills (Wong 2020).

The 2023 Incubator Discovery project, Building integrity and good academic practice in the context of cultural and social diversity investigated the experiences of international students, and highlighted a need to better make explicit often unspoken academic conventions and scaffold and support academic skills development for our increasingly diverse student intake.

To take this further, in the 2024 Skills for Success for All project we scoped the range of skills that staff believe are essential to their fields across the university, using the lens of academic and disciplinary literacies (Clarence & McKenna 2017; Hyland 2008). The study involved academics from 16 disciplines who responded to two open questions: What defines an academically excellent piece of student work in your discipline or field? and What skills (generic and disciplinary) are needed to produce such an academically excellent piece of work?

Unsurprisingly, the findings suggested that the reality of what constitutes excellence can vary considerably between fields.

Universal Yet Contextual

Some skills appeared ubiquitous across disciplines – criticality, academic writing, source evaluation, and argument construction dominated responses. These align predictably with institutional assessment criteria. However, the explanations which accompanied the ‘skills terminology’ revealed complexity. “Problem-solving” in mathematics was described as involving convergent thinking and tool application, while in education it was presented as divergent exploration of multiple valid solutions. “Application of theory” varies from numerical problem-solving in physics to reflective practice in nursing.

This disciplinary specificity has important implications for students crossing boundaries through minors or interdisciplinary programmes. Without explicit acknowledgment of these differences, students risk misunderstanding fundamental expectations.

Assessment alignment

Findings also suggested that assessment practices shape our conception of academic skills. The dominance of academic writing reflects current evaluation methods rather than the full spectrum of ways to create and communicate. Conspicuously absent were skills increasingly valued in graduate employment: teamwork appeared only once, collaboration barely featured, and AI-literacy received minimal mention despite growing workplace relevance.

In contrast, some of the most compelling findings lay in concepts which diverged from generic university assessment criteria and pre-existing skills taxonomies. These included patience, curiosity, imagination and risk-taking. These capabilities, often overlooked in formal frameworks, may be precisely what facilitates excellent work within specific disciplines.

Implications for Practice

In terms of our current curriculum review, this has important implications. First, we need to make disciplinary variations in common skills explicit to support student transitions. The common labelling of ESF will be helpful only if it is accompanied by clear information about what “creative thinking” or “effective writing” looks like in context. Second, we should examine whether our assessment practices align with the full range of skills we claim to value. Third, we should consider how we surface and teach discipline-specific “rare skills” that we recognise as educators but rarely formalise.

As higher education increasingly emphasises employability alongside academic achievement, we need assessment and teaching practices that develop both universal academic competencies and the nuanced capabilities that define disciplinary excellence, and which identify how these are transferrable beyond our degree programmes. This means moving beyond generic labels to embrace the rich complexity of what academic excellence actually entails across different fields of study.

References

British Council (no date) Preparing Young People for the Careers of the Future. https://www.britishcouncil.org/education/skills-employability/tool-resources/vocational-education-exchange/career-guidance/preparing-young-people-careers-future, accessed 14.8.25

Clarence, S., & McKenna, S. (2017). Developing academic literacies through understanding the nature of disciplinary knowledge. London review of education, 15(1), 38-49

Hyland, K. (2008). Disciplinary voices: Interactions in research writing. English text construction, 1(1), 5-22.

Wiliam, D. (no date) Defusing and Decoding AI for Maximum Fulfillment. https://www.thelearningfuture.com/the-learning-future-podcast/educationtransformed-20, accessed 14.8.25

Wong, S. C. (2020). Competency definitions, development and assessment: A brief review. International Journal of Academic Research in Progressive Education and Development, 9(3), 95-114.

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