General transferable skills: definition

(Transcript of a section of the General transferable skills report, 1998)

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The project proposes to define general transferable skills as abilities not confined to the learning or application of a specific subject. We are aware that that there is a large literature on general transferable skills, much of which produces very varied lists of what should be included under this heading.

We have drawn on that literature and tried to reduce it to certain manageable ideas, which are both usable within the law curriculum and meet the current national agendas of key skills and graduateness.

In this report, general transferable skills are identified as the following:

• communication: the ability to present an communicate in written and oral form and to use language appropriately in complex argument
• problem-solving: the ability to identify and analyse practical issues arising in a situation and to offer a practical solution, making effective use of time and resources available
• teamwork: the ability to establish working relations with others, to interact
  effectively, and to promote productive cooperation
• autonomy and personal skills: the ability to act independently, to deal with the unexpected, to reflect on one’s own actions and to accept and provide constructive feedback
• information technology: the ability to use IT tools and develop that use by integrating it into their own work
• numeracy: the ability to make use of numerical and statistical information as part of an argument or in a report
• intellectual skills: the ability to analyse, think critically, evaluate and
  synthesise information.

Legal skills and general transferable skills

Much work has been done in law to identify and develop certain competences among students as specifically legal skills, for example the DRAIN skills (drafting, research, advocacy, interviewing and advising, and negotiation) in vocational courses.

Though often taught rather narrowly as peculiarly legal skills, these skills are obviously capable of much wider application. For example, advocacy and negotiation skills are relevant in many professions. However some of the skills are very specific to the context of legal professional practice, for example legal drafting. Given this background, there is thus typically a distinction between legal skills and general transferable skills, although one must also recognise the overlap where it exists.

Skills as a language

A reaction we encountered from colleagues in law schools was that the approach to general transferable skills was generally perceived as an additional item which they were being required to build into the law curriculum. Their impression is that students should learn substantive legal principles and legal skills as well as general transferable skills.

This analysis is fundamentally misconceived. Holmes argues that the notion of ‘skills’ is a language, not a thing; we are simply talking about one way of describing the achievements of a student. In reporting on the general transferable skills of a student, we are saying that the student is not simply good for legal practice, but is equally capable of working in other environments.

This is the kind of language we employ when we write references or offer public justifications for higher education. This is the language which students have to use when they are applying for jobs both within and outside the legal professions. General transferable skills offer a vocabulary which articulates the achievements of student learning, which teachers and students can deploy in their discussions with each other and with those outside higher education.

It only adds to the curriculum to the extent that a particular institution identifies that it is not promoting the development of a particular skill among its students in the way it would like and then chooses to change what it is doing.

Transferability

The issue of transferability is important, and relates to the nature of the skills developed in education. Some would challenge the view stated above that general transferable skills are just a language to describe what students achieve in their subject studies.

Madeleine Atkins argues that the idea of transferability of such skills is questionable; we learn to perform tasks in particular contexts and may not be able to apply them to others. For instance, the ability to communicate by means of a coursework essay describing the law of privity does not necessarily equip a student to write a policy paper for the Law Commission, let alone for another government department.

The student needs to know something about the audience, the genre of writing, the appropriate register of vocabulary, and so on. A graduate does not have one generic ability to communicate, but several abilities to communicate in several contexts. Skills are thus related to contexts, albeit generic rather than specific contexts. The ability to transfer learning to different contexts can be seen as a skill in its own right, or at least as a distinct attribute in the development of skills.

Transferability is an appropriate term to describe the applicability of skills from one context to another, but we have to be aware that we are not describing some kind of universal applicability of what has been learned in the law curriculum.

In order to talk sensibly about general transferable skills we must specify the kinds of context in which we claim the skills are applicable. If we are talking about academic and vocational legal education, we are necessarily focusing on the skills that are specific to higher level learning and the contexts in which that kind of learning has a distinctive contribution to make, and these are often described as professional contexts. We also have to examine how we give students confidence and experience in making use of their skills in different contexts.

The description of general transferable skills as a language does help to explain how skills work and how they can be said to be transferable. Skills should not be conceived of as lists of competences in the sense that a student can be said to have 25 competences, 10 of which are legal skills, eight of which are general transferable skills and seven of which are personal skills.

Within our project the suggestion has been more that there is an interaction between different kinds of skill.

Legal knowledge needs to be used or applied. In order to apply that knowledge, a lawyer will need certain professional legal skills, for example drafting, researching or advocacy. But the lawyer will also need certain general transferable skills, such as communication, teamwork or information technology skills, in order to achieve a desired objective for a client.

There is a complex interplay between the various types of skills and knowledge which contribute as a set of overlays to make the effective practitioner. One set of skills interacts with another to be mutually supportive and to build up an individual’s competence as a lawyer.

In a similar way general transferable skills may enable the same person to perform other specific professional or work roles, for example if s/he moves into management or politics. Those roles have their own specific skills requirements which have to be acquired, perhaps by further training or study, but the general transferable skills enable a wide range of such roles to be operationalised.

To focus on describing general transferable skills is to focus on one overlay, but a holistic account of a student’s abilities takes all the overlays together.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010