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Due to rapid changes in the future labor market, transferable skills are recognized as a vital learning outcome for students in undergraduate higher education. However, ambiguities surrounding the concept and content of transferable skills hamper the actual teaching and learning of transferable skills. Consequently, there is a great need for an overview of the literature on transferable skills to qualify and develop the approaches to transferrable skills in higher education. This study aims to outline a typology of how transferable skills are conceptualized in health sciences education, that is, medicine, nursing and related health professionals’ education.

The study was a mixed studies literature review, which included quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods studies. A seven-stage sequential exploratory synthesis of the included studies was conducted.

This review showed that transferable skills reflected three main conceptualizations: Program Requirements, Employability and Holistic Development. Overall, the global methodological quality of the empirical studies of interventions to further transferable skills development in health science education was weak.

This study aids clear conceptualization in future empirical studies.

By distinguishing between three main conceptualizations of transferable skills, this study's typology supports alignment in transferable skills curricula because conceptually sound learning objectives provide teachers and students in health sciences education with a clear purpose and direct educators' choice of relevant teaching and assessment strategies.

This review – the first of its kind – contributes to conceptualization of transferable skills as the basis for curriculum development and research.

This paper aims to examine transferable skills and viable career transition pathways for hospitality and tourism workers. Future career prospects are discussed, along with the importance of reskilling for low-wage hospitality workers.

A network analysis is conducted to model skill relationships between the hospitality industry and other industries such as health-care and information technology. Multiple data are used in the analysis, including data from the US Department of Labor Occupational Information Network (O*NET), wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and job computerization data (Frey and Osborne, 2017).

Although hospitality workers have lower than average skills scores when compared to workers from other career clusters included in the analysis, they possess essential soft skills that are valuable in other industries. Therefore, improving hospitality workers’ existing soft skills may help them enhance their cross-sector mobility, which may allow them to obtain jobs with a lower likelihood of computerization.

The findings shed light on workforce development theories and practice in the hospitality industry by quantitatively analyzing cross-sector skill correlations. Sharpening transferable soft skills will be essential to enhancing hospitality workers’ career development opportunities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that specifically examines the skill taxonomy for the hospitality industry and identifies its connection with other in-demand career clusters.

The purpose of this paper is to inform the development of vocationally focused marketing curricula by identifying the employability attributes required from new and early career marketing graduates.

Existing literature was used to develop a matrix of previously identified attributes. Content analysis of 250 online person specifications for a range of entry‐level and early career posts allowed the matrix to be populated and modified. Like attributes were grouped and organised into clusters to provide profiles of common requirements.

Under half of employers demanded a degree and less than a quarter a marketing one. Experience is generally required, thus questioning the value employers place on marketing degrees. In total, 52 attributes, within 16 clusters, were identified, common ones included communications, interpersonal relationships, information and communications technology, planning, self‐management, decision making and problem solving. Within the subset of macro and meta competences, 22 personal traits, including creativity, responsibility, initiative, determination and confidence, were commonly required.

Findings quantify desirable attributes but fail to address issues of definition, rationale, contribution and measurement. These will be addressed within further qualitative research.

Educators should consider how the identified employability attributes can be addressed within the marketing curriculum in order to enhance the employment prospects of graduates.

The research verifies and adds to previous data regarding desirable attributes for marketing graduates. However, it also offers new, UK specific, data and a novel model to differentiate between micro and macro/meta competences and inform how transferrable skills and personal attributes combine with subject skills and knowledge to create employable graduates.

Public administration (PA) as an area of academic study and intellectual pursuit has long suffered from a lack of distinctiveness. While there is benefit inside struggle, and acknowledging that the field has advanced, there is progress remaining to be made. Focusing on the development of a skill base among Public Administrators that adds value to current vocational settings and positions the practitioner to be professionally lithe (through skills that are transferable to other public settings, quasipublic settings, and private industry) is personally and professionally healthy. To this end, mastery of statistical process control, process improvement, lean service/manufacturing, six sigma, and project management will optimally position the PA practitioner to add organizational value while concomitantly maximizing vocational flexibility

The chapter evaluates the value of practice-based teaching and learning on a UK postgraduate unit and describes the development of conceptual models for the student practice-based experience.

Student experience is explored through the use of an in-depth case study. Student understanding is explored through an exit survey of students.

Student experience of the unit was positive and negative. Positive experiences stem from good client communications, a motivated student team, and the buzz of a real project. Positive experiences appear to lead to a perception of pride in outcomes and personal transferrable skills. Negative experiences stem from the lack of life experience, language difficulties, client unavailability, lack of subject knowledge, and literature gaps which left students feeling ill-equipped to deal with the international group context. Negative experiences lead to stress and poor group development.

The study is based on a single simple case. The methodology has sought to reduce problems with internal validity and bias. The data collection and analysis methods are repeatable and we encourage other academics to test our conceptual models and conclusions.

Conceptual models for positive and negative experience are proposed.

The study suggests there is a balance to be sought between providing a positive student experience and practical learning. Practice-based learning adds significant value to the student in terms of improved understanding of hard and soft tools, but may need to be based upon positive and negative experience.

Globally, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning in schools has become an increasingly popular and growing area of interest for educational reform. This prompts discussions about Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM), which is shifting educational paradigms toward art integration in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects. Authentic tasks (i.e. real-world problems) address complex or multistep questions and offer opportunities to integrate disciplines across science and arts, such as in STEAM. The main purpose of this study is to better understand the STEAM instructional programs and student learning offered by nonprofit organizations and by publicly funded schools in Ontario, Canada.

This study addresses the following research question: what interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary skills do students learn through different models of STEAM education in nonprofit and in-school contexts? We carried out a qualitative case study in which we conducted interviews, observations and data analysis of curriculum documents. A total of 103 participants (19 adults – director and instructors/teachers – and 84 students) participated in the study. The four STEAM programs comparatively taught both discipline specific and beyond discipline character-building skills. The skills taught included: critical thinking and problem solving; collaboration and communication; and creativity and innovation.

The main findings on student learning focused on students developing perseverance and adaptability, and them learning transferable skills.

In contrast to other research on STEAM, this study identifies both the enablers and the tensions. Also, we stress ongoing engagement with stakeholders (focus group), which has the potential to impact change in teaching and teacher development, as well as in related policies.

This paper aims to explore challenges and opportunities associated with young carers' employment in Australia.

Using a multi-stakeholder approach, this study captures the reflections of stakeholders (n = 8) and young carers (n = 10) about opportunities for, and experiences of, paid employment for young carers.

Despite many organisations internationally increasingly pushing diversity agendas and suggesting a commitment to equal opportunity experiences, this study found that young carers' work opportunities are often disrupted by their caring role. For young carers to be successful in their careers, organisations need to provide further workplace flexibility, and other support is required to attract and retain young carers into organisations and harness their transferrable skills for meaningful careers.

The paper highlights important implications for human resource management practitioners given the need to maximise the participation of young carers as workers, with benefits for young carers themselves, employers and society.

The research adds to the human resource management and work–family conflict literature in examining young carers through drawing on Conservation of Resources theory to highlight resources invested in caring leads to loss of educational and work experience resources. This leads to loss cycles and spirals, which can potentially continue across a lifetime, further contributing to disadvantage and lack of workplace and societal inclusion for this group of young people.

Blogging has become a well-established method of online communication and publication, used by individuals and organisations to disseminate news, ideas and information. In their earlier forms, blogs were used as online diaries, but have now evolved into complex digital environments. The purpose of this paper is to consider whether blogging can be framed as a mode of work-integrated learning in the context of journalism and media education, and to ask whether blogging can develop transferable skills useful in graduate-level employment.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with established undergraduate bloggers to investigate which skills and attributes were developed through blogging.

When evaluated against the Prospects UK list of graduate attributes (the Government career’s service) blogging allows the development of the vast majority of transferable skills, abilities and behaviours expected of graduates. It is necessary to structure the curriculum to ensure that blogging is taught, and blogging activity monitored and evaluated, so that journalism undergraduates maximise the opportunities offered by blogging and fully reflect on their experiences.

This paper argues that these online environments, with their associated communities, offer journalism students opportunities for work-integrated learning. It argues that blog environments have the potential to enable students to develop journalism-specific skills, and enhance transferable graduate attributes including creativity, sophisticated communication competencies, initiative and problem solving. It suggests that blogging offers a platform for accessing experiential learning, and as such should be considered within a curriculum for work-integrated learning in the journalism and media subject area.

The purpose of this study is to examine the moderating effect of the reflective practice of business students on how it helps to develop their employability skills through various university strategies.

The study employed a simple random sample to select undergraduate level 400 students from the Universities under study (the University of Ghana, University of Professional Studies Ghana, Lancaster University Ghana and Webster University Ghana). Only final-year students with an informed judgement on the reflective practice and various institutional practices to acquire graduate employability skills were participated. The independent variables of the study are institutional strategies (curriculum design, extra curriculum, work-integrated learning, career development centre, university collaboration with the industry, student engagement, internship job placement), the moderator is the reflective practice and the dependent variable of the study is graduate employability.

The study found that the moderation role of reflective practice had a significant effect on institutional strategies (extracurriculum, career development centre, university collaboration with the industry, student engagement and internship job placement) and graduate employability.

The study was limited to only undergraduate business students from four universities ignoring other disciplines and postgraduate students.

The practical implication is that reflective practice must be an integral tool for various universities if they want students to use their strategies to sharpen their employability skills.

The social implications of the study emphasise the reflective practice of graduate students in universities. This implies that firms and other institutions must consider reflective practice for the maximum output of their employees.

The concept of employability is a bit complex as it concerns many stakeholders of the educational process; the students, academic staff, employers, policymakers and higher education; the private sector; and the government. Although examining students' employability development skills is of great importance, students' reflective practice tends to be overlooked in most studies. Therefore, the focus of this study examines how the reflective practice of graduate students promotes employability through the various university strategies, which had not been considered.

The primary purpose of this paper is to highlight the utility of operationalising the concept of skill ecosystems, or more accurately “intermediate occupational skill ecosystems”.

This paper draws on the process and findings of an empirical study of intermediate occupations in Scotland which set out to explore changing systems of initial skill creation and related problems of skill by embedding these systems within the broader canvas of skill ecosystems.

Operationalising skill ecosystems not only provided a framework from which to explore and provide an explanation of changing initial systems of skill creation but also supported broader conjectures on the nature of developments and problems within intermediate occupations.

The operationalisation presented has relevance to policy makers and academics beyond the scope of this particular examination of intermediate occupations. For policy makers, it emphasises that better skills utilisation cannot be reduced to the level of the individual; that the supply, demand, development and deployment of skills are interrelated and not discrete; and that the roles and relative influences of actors in a position to help build and sustain better skill ecosystems are changing. For academics concerned with exploring changing systems of skill creation, this, or some similar, operationalisation, has potential practical application in terms of supporting key stages in the research process.

This paper's value centres around the proposition, and illustration, that it is possible to effectively utilise a simple operationalisation of the inherently “messy” concept of skill ecosystems without losing the essence and complexity of the relations and dynamics embodied in the concept.