How to develop your Skills for Success

Skills development isn't something that happens separately from your degree – it's woven into the experience itself. The Skills for Success Framework is built around 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 skills 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 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 skills like Inclusivity, Adaptivity, Data and Digital Literacy, and Individuality. 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 skills are developed in multiple contexts.  A single experience – a group project, a placement, a volunteer role, a part-time job – can develop several skills at once, and the same skill can grow through very different kinds of activity.  There is no single path.

Find out more about the ten Skills for Success

One of the ten Skills for Success – Individuality – is explicitly about recognising and building on what you already bring. This is a useful starting point for thinking about all ten skills.

You arrived at the University with a rich set of skills 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 Skills for Success; 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 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 Skills for Success page can help with this.

Reflecting on your Skills for Success

Skills develop through experience, but being intentional about it makes a real difference. This means noticing which skills you're using and developing, and sometimes choosing or shaping experiences with a particular skill 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 and what you're working towards.

• Approach assessments and coursework as opportunities to practise specific skills 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 (Inclusivity and/or Curiosity).
• 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 what Skills for Success look like in action. 

• Engage actively in seminars, workshops, tutorials, and group work. These structured environments are among the richest settings for developing Collaboration and Communication.
• 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.

LINK: Reflecting on your Skills for Success