Revisiting the Skills Agenda: A Complicated Geography

Abstract

This paper revisits the skills agenda and suggests that in light of shifts from supply-side to demand-led provision within the UK higher education sector, there is a need to think more critically about the role and place of skills within university curricula. It suggests that if universities are to respond effectively to sector changes, then the increasing focus on embedding employability and skill development within curricula needs to be accompanied by consideration of how skills are understood, negotiated and given meaning at the curricula level. Consequently, this paper assesses how ‘place’ affects our understandings of skills; it moves on to address the relationship between skills and the development of student personality, before concluding with an exploration of the performance of skills, which questions what we actually mean when we talk about skills.

Keywords:

• Place
• personality
• performance
• skills agenda

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Gerald Dunning and Peter Saunders for their useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. In addition, I have found the comments of the anonymous referees and the editor extremely helpful in refining this paper for publication.