An employer perspective: how do our refreshed Graduate Attributes relate to industry? - Transcript

Helen Hook:

In this micro-CPD Verity Stokes, Director at Katie Bard will be talking about how our refreshed graduate attributes align to the skills and qualities which are important to a wide range of employers and which our students will therefore need in the future.

Question posed: How do the Graduate Attributes relate to the values, skills and behaviours in your organisation?

Verity Stokes:

So, if I look at the companies and organisations that we work with - we work across the Midlands and Birmingham, we work across London and the South East – and they’re across a real range of industry sectors. 

And so if I take each of the themes in terms of the Graduate Attributes, Academic Excellence is super important: effectively they are looking for robust academics that are able to be people who will be future leaders, and that means those that not only learn their subject and are able to take it forward, but are moving that to the next level – people that are solutions seekers, people that are coming up with creative, new, ideas, and are able to bring that into the context of the company.

These are Future Leaders, and so that leadership aspect of it is really ingrained throughout all of these different themes, and in particular if we look at where companies are going in the next five to ten years, the productivity that they are looking for is not going to be the typical productivity gains that we’ve seen happen after previous recessions over the last fifteen or twenty years, but it’s going to be about added value, and it’s what that person or individual can bring to the organisation beyond their immediate skillset.  So that leadership part is super important.

What is unique – I think – to UoB graduates, and I interview graduates from a lot of universities, is that they are truly altruistic, to some extent, in what they do.  So, they can synthesise information, they can work it through, they can see the wood and the trees, but underneath that they’re then being able to put a coherent argument together that considers ‘other’, and that is super important when you’re working in ‘business’ of any nature, whether that be from your third-sector organisations to your large global multi-nationals. 

And this all leads through to the thread of future-mindedness.  You know, businesses aren’t hiring graduates to do a job, they’re hiring future leaders in the business, and they need those that will be able to grow and develop with the business, and lead that business as it goes forward – so that ability to work with AI, that ability to work with technology, to be able to take that huge amount of information that they’re getting through that data, to be able to synthesise it into something which is coherent, and be able to lead that business in the future, is exactly what employers are looking to recruit for at the moment.