Institute:	QUT
Discipline:	Social Sciences
Title:	Social Science Competencies (Employer perspectives)
Year addressed:	1st Year
Phase:	Identifying Attributes and Curriculum
Generic Attributes:	Top 10 as identified by employers - Establishes positive working relationships with relevant people - Manages workload efficiently and effectively - Demonstrates ability to present information - Demonstrates self-management - Able to identify information requirements - Demonstrates self-awareness - Recognises and responds to the physical and psychological needs of oneself in the workplace - Demonstrates ability to gather and record information - Able to follow instructions in the workplace - Able to follow workplace procedures for hazard identification and risk control

Issues Revealed:

-Educators in social science must ensure that "graduates have acquired skills to access the array of sources and the critical skills to be able to evaluate and prioritise these in terms of validity and utility."
-The project has highlighted the need to provide "students with the opportunity to present material verbally and to work with information in face to face group or team settings as well as to participate in 'electronic discussion groups' if they are to meet employers' requirements"
-Staff consultation Groups believed that there was a need for academic staff to: "Identify and publicise aspects of their current teaching programs and the university experience that provide relevant capabilities"; "Assist students to reframe their training experiences to recognise the exposure to such experiences that they may have"; "Reconsider curriculum design to provide clearly labelled opportunities for such learning and experiences".
-There should be a formal feedback loop which assists students to understand and process their reasons for choosing alternative methods of study and what they learnt from these choices

Actions Taken:

-Identifying capabilities: a national survey of employers and academics was undertaken to identify relevant generic competencies and skills. More than 4500 attributes were identified and needed to be narrowed down to 1294. In the end 40 different splices of thequestionnaires were developed instead of the original 8.
-Curriculum: In November 1998 a workshop was held on quality of teaching with psychology and counselling academics and administration staff to review and revise course curriculum. The capabilities were grouped into areas of similarity and discussed. Considerations were drawn up for each set of attributes and ideas for their integration into the curriculum.

Lessons Learned/Reflections:

-The questionnaire design could have been too long /short hence the response rate being lower than it could have been.
-A series of recommendations were compiled for generalising the framework to other disciplines.
-The generic capability "Follow workplace procedures for hazard identification and risk control" was an unexpected finding from the surveys and is an area that will need further consideration and development.
-A lot of work has to be done on formalising the level of capability /competency acquisition currently provided within the degree courses