Foreword Free

When I was an undergraduate student, all I needed to worry about was mastering the chemistry knowledge and related laboratory skills. It was this knowledge and these skills that would contribute to my final grade and that grade is what employers would largely base their selection processes on. These were simpler times!

For most of the time that I have taught chemistry in universities, there has been a growing focus on teaching—and assessing—transferable skills to STEM students of all levels. These skills started out as a relatively modest list: group work, problem solving, and communication. The length of that list has grown over the decades to include employability, commercial awareness, cultural awareness, entrepreneurship, creativity, global citizenship, and many more. This situation has been driven by employers who look to universities to fulfill their needs in the form of well-rounded, capable graduates who can hit the ground running and make a worthwhile contribution to their workplace.

Teaching discipline-specific content is fairly straightforward, especially for academics with expert subject knowledge. Teaching content whilst also infusing opportunities to develop a broad set of skills is much more challenging and such provision is patchy across higher education. It is also the case that many students, and even recent graduates, remain largely ignorant of the need for them to develop these skills and ignorant also of the reasons why academics persist in using teaching approaches that help to develop these skills.

This book is a timely addition as it hands the power for developing transferable skills to students and graduates themselves. Without this book, skills development is something that is done to them rather than something that they can own, enhance, exploit, and use to their advantage in the future. The authors tackle not just transferable skills development—where academic interest often ends—but extends the scope to cover the complete range of professional skills. These skills really do allow students and fresh graduates to take control of their professional destiny; targeting what they want to do, preparing for specific roles, building long-term networks and support systems, and ultimately making a meaningful contribution to their workplace, whatever and wherever that may be. The focus of the book is not what employers, or society, needs, but what the students and graduates need to get to where they plan to be. The focus on the readers themselves, rather than on educational approaches, is refreshing. It will benefit future students, scientists, and STEM graduates directly and, ultimately, their employers too.

Professor Tina Overton

Hull