Show Notes
How do universities ensure their programmes and curricula meet the demands from industry, government – and students themselves – for career-ready graduates equipped with vital transferable skills? Skills – whether you call them soft, transferable, power, productivity, work-based or human skills – have come to dominate the conversation about employability. The rapid advance of artificial intelligence, coupled with a shrinking number of entry-level roles, means that graduates are looking for the capabilities that will give them an edge. Industry and governments, meanwhile, have their eye on the economic and innovation advantages that come with an agile, digitally literate and productive workforce. Alongside academic skills, universities have long provided students with opportunities to develop communication, critical thinking and teamwork skills, but external demands mean they need to be more intentional about embedding transferable skills in curricula – and give graduates means to evidence this learning. To find out how institutions in the UK and Australia are responding to the call for work-ready graduates with a skill set adapted to the modern economy, we talked to:
Sir David Bell is vice-chancellor and chief executive of the University of Sunderland. He is also vice-chair of Skills England. Sir David has served as Her Majesty’s chief inspector of schools, and his public sector roles include permanent secretary at the UK Department for Education, director of education and libraries for Newcastle City Council and chief executive of Bedfordshire County Council. Dawn Bennett is a higher education consultant, with a focus on graduate outcomes and student success. She is also founder of the Developing Employ-ability Initiative, which gives students and educators a framework for managing career development and mapping employability skills, and a senior associate with consultancy Outside Opinion. She spent 14 years as the John Curtin distinguished professor of higher education and director of the Developing Employability and Creative Workforce Initiatives at Curtin University, Australia, and continues to engage in research. She is a former professional violist. Derek Harding is manager of the VET Educator Academy at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. In this role, he works on professional development for staff to promote academic quality. A former high school teacher, he has experience in foundation education and instructional design.
For more advice and insight on developing transferable skills from academics and experts from universities around the world, read our spotlight Soft skills for hard times.
More from Campus Talks by Times Higher Education
Learning science has moved university teaching on from lecturers pouring knowledge into students’ heads. Today, effective educators see two-way engagement and participation as key drivers of learning. Pedagogies such as active learning as well as the need for inclusive, welcoming classrooms are more embedded into university practice, thanks to the research and advocacy of experts such as this Campus Talks guest. David Gooblar is associate professor of English and director of general education literature at the University of Iowa. In the latter position, he oversees a cohort of about 3,000 undergraduate students and supervises about 50 instructors. With a research focus on higher education, race and gender, he is author of One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable (Harvard University Press, 2025) and The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching (HUP, 2019). His column on college teaching ran in The Chronicle of Higher Education from 2013 to 2020 and he shared teaching insights in his newsletter Pedagogy Unbound. In this conversation, he offers advice to tackle common teaching challenges such as getting students to do the reading, contribute to class discussions and engage critically with AI. In the latest Campus spotlight guide, experts from around the world share more advice on how to be an even better teacher. Campus Talks: Backwards course design – from learning outcomes to assessment to activities To book a place at the Innovation & Impact Summit 2026 in Seoul on 17-19 November, go to Book tickets | THE Innovation & Impact Summit 2026 and use the promo code CAMPUS20 for a 20 per cent discount.
Drawing on research into the experiences of Chinese academics in the UK, we hear how these subtle but powerful discriminatory acts manifest in universities and what could be done to address them - - - Microaggressions are often overlooked in the official literature on discrimination which tends to focus on more explicit behaviours that can be readily identified and dealt with. Yet these seemingly subtle acts can have a big impact on those subjected to them, as this week’s podcast guest explains. Ming Cheng, professor of higher education at Sheffield Hallam University, carried out research into the experiences of Chinese scholars working in English universities and found a striking prevalence of microaggressions. On this week’s episode of Campus Talks, she shares her definition of microaggressions and gives examples of how they manifest within universities, drawn from her research. We hear about the impact of these behaviours but also what action universities could take to prevent microaggressions going unnamed and unopposed. You can read Ming's full research paper here: Navigating microaggressions in the workplace: experiences of Chinese international academics in England | Higher Education | Springer Nature Link.
As open research moves closer to the mainstream, how it is practised is also responding to broader changes in technology and the research ecosystem. Uses of generative AI – to synthesise data, write academic papers and create funding applications – challenge the status quo, even as the tools bring gains in accessibility and efficiency. How can young scientists take on practices that align with open research goals for outputs that are findable, accessible, reusable and interoperable while still working within traditional measures of academic success? To provide insight and practical advice, this episode talks to two experts in open science, with expertise in teaching, research, publishing and policy: Julia Priess-Buchheit is a professor and researcher at Kiel University in Germany and, since 2018, has been scientific director and chair of the board of the Centre for Constructive Science. Priess-Buchheit has provided scientific advice to international and European initiatives, including the Global Research Initiative on Open Science and the European Open Science Cloud Association. In June, the report she co-authored with a large interdisciplinary team, Open Science and the Effects of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Scientific Exchange, was presented at the meeting of the Panel for the Future of Science and Technology at the European Parliament. Sarahanne Field is an assistant professor in pedagogy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. With a background in psychology and metascience, she teaches on ethics, research practice, scientific knowledge production and its relationship to society, as well as qualitative research methods. Field is editor-in-chief of the open access Journal of Trial and Error. To learn more about how to foster an open research culture, head to our latest spotlight guide. You’ll find a previous Campus Talks episode about open access here.
While academia offers some well-trodden career paths – from PhD then post-doc to lecturer, professor, departmental head and ultimately into university leadership – there are plenty of alternative routes to success in higher education. On this week’s episode of Campus Talks, we find out how individuals can carve out their own unique careers within the university hierarchy while still demonstrating the necessary knowledge and skills to those all-important promotion and recruitment panels. Harriet Dunbar-Morris, the new deputy president and chief academic officer at South East Technological University (SETU), in Ireland, offers her take on how those in higher education can best prepare for the next career move and what university recruiters themselves could do to attract a greater diversity of talent. Harriet, who was previously pro vice-chancellor academic and provost at the University of Buckingham, shares her own career building strategies, what success looks like for her and why demonstrating impact can and should go beyond just publication and funding records.
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