Transferable and employability skills gained from studying Politics and IR have never been more important to students and their parents. In our latest article, we look at how the discipline is faring in its attempts to deliver transferable skills. Concern about skills is driven by a number of factors, including a desire by students to prepare for a competitive employment environment when they graduate and government higher education policy at both a national and regional level. Crucially, transferable skills were part of the recent TEF White Paper. £9,000 tuition fees have also increased skills anxiety amongst the new generation of PIR students. Yet, social science departments are often criticised for not engaging sufficiently with the transferable and employability skills agenda. Many academics appear hostile to this agenda.
We would resist such criticisms and follow Haigh and Kilmartin (1999: 203 Italics added) on the importance of the transferable skills agenda. As they argue:
The development of personal transferable skills is a fundamental part of achieving most of that we consider essential to a good education. It is not merely about making students more employable. It is about making them more capable.
In other words, this is about making students better scholars, something all academics ought to be able to get behind.
The Quality Assurance Agency framework for Politics and International Relations degrees sets out a wide range of skills that PIR graduates should have. Summarising somewhat, these include:
To examine how this is being delivered, with support from the PSA Executive’s Teaching and Learning sub-committee, we conducted a national audit of UK Politics/IR departments in the academic year 2013-14. We collected data from online module descriptions in UK Universities offering BA single honours undergraduate degrees in Politics, Political Studies, or Politics and/with International Relations or Government. In order to collect the data itself the webpage of each politics/IR module was subjected to a content analysis of the transferable skills, or opportunities to develop these skills, mentioned in the online module description.
Across the discipline there are many good, in some cases prize-winning, examples of teaching and assessment that encourage the imparting of useful skills students will find valuable in the employment market. These include simulations and role plays, group projects, and some even lead to student work being published in academic journals. Others have shown how it can be achieved in research methods modules. This is all highly commendable and highlights the very good work going on in many PIR departments.
Overall results suggest that the discipline is underselling the transferable skills that can be gained from studying Politics and IR at university. As figure 1 shows, only 48% of the 1546 online module descriptions included in the sample mentioned critical thinking skills, despite this being central to academic endeavour in the discipline. Similarly, only 38% mentioned communication skills, 36% presentation skills, 29% research skills and 27% group-working skills. Remarkably, only around 4% mentioned any sort of quantitative skills. Yet, most modules, somewhere along the way, will contain aspects of all or some of these things. The research found no major differences between the English sector and Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish provision, despite different fee structures in the devolved countries. It also found that, contrary to previous research in this area, Russell Group universities were as likely to mention transferable skills as non-Russell Group universities.
This suggests that there is certainly room to improve on how UK Politics and IR departments communicate to students and their parents the key skills that can be gained from studying PIR via publicly accessible platforms such as online module guides and departmental websites. The TEF and various other developments, not least the need to successfully recruit students, make this an important issue for PIR departments to get right. If we don’t tell students what we are teaching them, then they won’t realise that they have gained a whole range of skills through their study of politics. Improving upon this in the future will hopefully increase students’ understanding, capabilities and knowledge of the skills and employability benefits a degree in Politics/IR can bring.
Alistair Clark is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Newcastle University, UK. He is an elected member (2013–16) of the UK Political Studies Association Executive. He is author of Political Parties in the UK (2012), currently being revised for a second edition, and his publications on political parties and elections have appeared in many leading journals. He tweets at @ClarkAlistairJ. Tristan Martin is a PhD candidate and the Berrington Scholar in Politics at Newcastle University. His research focuses on European policy and the British Conservative Party. He tweets at @tmNCL. Their article ‘An Audit of Transferable Skills Teaching in UK Politics Departments’ is published in European Political Science.
Image: Charlie Foster
