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Digital Skills for Employability

What are Digital Skills for Employability? 

Within every curriculum there is a requirement to articulate Programme Learning Outcomes required for successful completion.  At SHU these are defined within four key areas: Knowledge and understanding; Intellectual Skills; Subject-specific and/or Professional/Practical Skills; Transferable/Key Skills.

The Highly Skilled Employment: Digital Capability (DC) strategic priority requires all courses to identify and map relevant Digital Capabilities and skills required within the curriculum.  Currently, there is not a requirement for DC programme Learning Outcomes, but it is recommended that new or re-validating provisions include relevant DC Programme Learning Outcomes going forwards.

This page provides an example of how these Digital Capabilities could be articulated within programmes outcomes, although these may already be implicit within existing programmes.
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Knowledge and understanding On completion of the course a typical student should be able to:

  • Understand how digital technology is changing across and impacting on personal, professional, and societal spheres.
  • Know where and how to access relevant digital technologies, and have strategies for identifying need, and discovery of solution.
  • Understand the benefits, challenges and potential risks to self, others and professional organisations of pertinent digital technologies and associated behaviours.
Intellectual Skills On completion of the course a typical student should be able to:

  • Critically evaluate digital technology in terms of its provenance, purpose and relevance to a given context.
  • Recognise (and have experienced) the value and potential of creative, agile thinking and innovative approaches.
Subject-specific and/or Professional Practice Skills On completion of the course a typical student should be able to:

  • Identify and exploit relevant digital technologies to optimise / improve professional practice.
  • Integrate digital technologies to enhance professional practice.
Transferable/Key Skills On completion of the course a typical student should be able to:

  • Work fluently across a range of relevant tools, platforms, and applications to achieve complex tasks.
  • Adopt and develop new digital practices in different settings or for new projects and opportunities.
  • Communicate effectively in digital media and spaces and maintain a professional online identity.
  • Work collaboratively in digital environments, using synchronous and asynchronous approaches appropriately.
  • Demonstrate resilience to digital change, through the adoption of personal strategies for wellbeing, information and data management, and experience in problem solving.
  • Employ strategies for organising and managing digital data and environments.

What are digital skills that support Highly Skilled Employment:

  • Transferable skills and knowledge around digital technologies
  • Not just using technologies themselves but understanding them and their social implications
  • Students with the confidence and capability to adapt existing knowledge and skills, and learn new ones as technology evolves
  • Developing digital capability isn’t as simple as “learning to use _____ (e.g. Excel)”.
  • It is instead fundamental knowledge and problem-solving strategies which can help with learning any technology and its application

In Practice

To support the development of student digital skills, a new website (Hallam Digital Skills) has been created to support students. It is located in the IT & Library tab in MyHallam. We would like staff to have a look at it and encourage students to use it.


LinkedIn Learning is a website with thousands of online video courses on a range of subjects, including many about digital technologies and their application. We have purchased a license for all staff, students and recent graduates to use it. We would like staff to have a look through and see if there are resources there which could support your students. There will be an integration with Blackboard shortly which allows you to put LinkedIn Learning content straight into your Blackboard sites.

We are also piloting a digital diagnostic tool developed by Jisc that could help students (and staff) identify their strengths and areas for development in terms of digital skills. Based on these pilot approaches we will be looking at how we roll the tool out more widely during the 20/21 academic year.

We have developed a generic curriculum map of digital capabilities students need for highly skilled employment. We want all courses to go through a process of contextualising these capabilities and thinking about how they develop digital skills in their students. We will be arranging workshops with departments and subject areas during this academic year to support staff with this process, which will ensure our courses are fully prepared for delivering digital skills in the 20/21 academic year.

RESOURCES 

Generic Curriculum Map of Digital Capabilities This table is indicative and designed to act as a guide. There are overlaps between capabilities and levels, it is therefore open to interpretation and contextualisation.
The ways in which these descriptors are developed, and the level at which they take place may well be different for different disciplines and contexts.
Digital Capability Example Programme Outcomes Within every curriculum there is a requirement to articulate Programme Learning Outcomes required for successful completion. At SHU these are defined within four key areas: Knowledge and understanding; Intellectual Skills; Subject-specific and/or Professional/Practical Skills; Transferable/Key Skills.

 
Hallam Digital Skills website Discover and learn new digital skills to help you study effectively and enhance your employability with our range of tutorial pages curated especially for Hallam students.