Students’ perceptions of an interdisciplinary global study tour: uncovering inexplicit employability skills

ABSTRACT

For higher education graduates to be effective in the workplace, they require strong technical skills and the capability to operate across diverse knowledge landscapes to solve real world problems. At an Australian university, an interdisciplinary, short-term study tour programme was utilised to enhance students’ inexplicit employability skills with a focus on managing complexity while developing agility and creativity. To investigate the effectiveness of such a programme, we examined students’ perceptions of an interdisciplinary teamwork assessment task that was undertaken in an international context via a study tour model. We achieved this by, first, introducing a purposely designed interdisciplinary teamwork assessment task, which focused on students presenting innovative ideas to peers and industry members. Second, we elicited student responses via a case study approach that incorporated mixed methods, utilising several data collection instruments prior to, during, and after students participated in a study tour. The findings suggest that integrating a purposely designed interdisciplinary teamwork assessment task, via a short-term study tour model, uncovered certain inexplicit employability skills, namely managing complexity, developing agility and creativity. We make specific recommendations to support this insight, contributing to the mobility teaching and learning research field.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural competency
• graduate attributes
• inexplicit employability skills
• interdisciplinary
• mixed methods
• study tours
• teamwork

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Rachael Hains-Wesson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1549-4504

Kaiying Ji http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4332-3892