How to develop your Graduate Attributes

Developing your Graduate Attributes isn't something that happens separately from your degree – it's woven into the experience itself.  Your Graduate Attributes are developed through at least three contexts, all of which are part of being a student here: 

Your academic experience – the content, ideas and practices at the heart of your subject – actively builds attributes like critical thinking, curiosity, and problem solving.  Engaging with your discipline, questioning assumptions, working with evidence, and grappling with complex or open-ended problems all develop these skills, whether or not you've thought of them in those terms before.

The way your teaching and learning is designed and delivered creates opportunities to develop attributes like collaboration, reflection, and communication.  Group work, presenting your thinking, receiving and acting on feedback, and reviewing your own progress all contribute – often in ways that feel like ordinary parts of study rather than skills development in any formal sense.

The richness and diversity of your wider student experience – including your life outside the classroom – enables attributes like personal effectiveness, adaptability, and confidence.  Navigating new environments, engaging with people from different backgrounds, managing competing demands, and making use of digital tools all play a part.

These contexts don't operate in isolation, and individual attributes are developed in multiple contexts.  A single experience – a group project, a placement, a volunteer role, a part-time job – can develop several skills and attributes at once, and the same attributes can grow through very different kinds of activity.  There is no single path.

Find out more about the Graduate Attributes Framework

You arrived at the University with a rich set of skills, mindsets, and experiences already developed – through school, part-time work, caring responsibilities, creative pursuits, sport, travel, community involvement, and much more.  These aren't separate from your Graduate Attributes; they are part of them and your employability.

Before focusing on where you want to grow, it's worth taking stock of what's already there. You may find that skills and attributes you've been quietly using for years are strengths you haven't yet fully recognised or named.  The reflection questions on the 'Reflecting on your experiences' page can help with this.

Reflecting on your experiences

Skills and mindsets develop through experience, but being intentional about it makes a real difference.  This means noticing which skills and mindsets you're using and developing, and sometimes choosing or shaping experiences with a particular skill or attribute in mind.  You don't need a formal programme or an extensive list of activities; what matters is that you're engaged and paying attention to what you're learning.

Here are some ways to find and create opportunities, organised around the three contexts above.  Not all of these will apply to every student – the right starting point depends on where you already are with a given skill or mindset, and what you're working towards.

• Approach assessments and coursework as opportunities to practise specific skills and mindsets deliberately – for example, focusing on how you construct an argument (critical thinking), how you tackle an unfamiliar problem (problem solving), or how you engage with perspectives very different from your own (curiosity, outlook and engagement).
• Look for options within your programme that stretch you into less familiar territory – new methods, different kinds of assessment, or topics that challenge your existing thinking.
• Pay attention to the skills already embedded in the academic work you do: research, analysis, synthesis, writing, presenting – these are examples of the Graduate Attributes look like in your discipline. 

• Engage actively in seminars, workshops, tutorials, and group work. These structured environments are among the richest settings for developing skills in collaboration and communication, and your mindsets around enquiry and lifelong learning, and outlook and engagement.
• Treat feedback as a development tool, not just a grade.  What does it tell you about how you're thinking or working?  What would you do differently next time?
• Make use of conversations with tutors, supervisors, and peers – dialogue often surfaces learning that solitary study doesn't. 

Experiences alone don't guarantee learning – what you do with them matters.  Reflection is the process that turns experience into insight: helping you notice what you're developing, understand how and why, and decide what comes next.

Reflecting on your experiences