How do universities ensure their programmes and curricula meet the demands from industry, government – and students themselves – for career-ready graduates equipped with vital transferable skills?

Skills – whether you call them soft, transferable, power, productivity, work-based or human skills – have come to dominate the conversation about employability. The rapid advance of artificial intelligence, coupled with a shrinking number of entry-level roles, means that graduates are looking for the capabilities that will give them an edge. Industry and governments, meanwhile, have their eye on the economic and innovation advantages that come with an agile, digitally literate and productive workforce.

Alongside academic skills, universities have long provided students with opportunities to develop communication, critical thinking and teamwork skills, but external demands mean they need to be more intentional about embedding transferable skills in curricula – and give graduates means to evidence this learning.

To find out how institutions in the UK and Australia are responding to the call for work-ready graduates with a skill set adapted to the modern economy, we talked to:

• Sir David Bell is vice-chancellor and chief executive of the University of Sunderland. He is also vice-chair of Skills England. Sir David has served as Her Majesty’s chief inspector of schools, and his public sector roles include permanent secretary at the UK Department for Education, director of education and libraries for Newcastle City Council and chief executive of Bedfordshire County Council.
• Dawn Bennett is a higher education consultant, with a focus on graduate outcomes and student success. She is also founder of the Developing Employ-ability Initiative, which gives students and educators a framework for managing career development and mapping employability skills, and a senior associate with consultancy Outside Opinion. She spent 14 years as the John Curtin distinguished professor of higher education and director of the Developing Employability and Creative Workforce Initiatives at Curtin University, Australia, and continues to engage in research. She is a former professional violist.
• Derek Harding is manager of the VET Educator Academy at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. In this role, he works on professional development for staff to promote academic quality. A former high school teacher, he has experience in foundation education and instructional design.

For more advice and insight on developing transferable skills from academics and experts from universities around the world, read our spotlight Soft skills for hard times.

Her ability to engage with leading-edge technology has long set Jenny Moffett apart, whether that’s her early embrace of the potential of online education for professional development or using immersive technology to help medical students navigate ambiguous situations. And now last year’s winner of the Times Higher Education Award for Most Innovative Teacher is working on understanding the potential of artificial intelligence to engage students in reflective writing.

Jenny is a senior lecturer and educationalist in the Health Professions Education Centre at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences in Dublin. She also serves as programme director for the postgraduate diploma in health professions education, where she leads curriculum design and delivery to support educators in developing evidence-informed, learner-centred teaching practices.

To mark this year’s THE Awards, which are being presented in Edinburgh on 13 November, we talk to Jenny about how educators can put AI to use in a way that fosters efficiency without taking away rich cognitive work, how her uptake of technology has evolved, strategies for dealing with uncertainty and complexity in the classroom, why students should learn to be bored, and the skills university teachers can develop to future-proof their practice (hint: it involves finding the spark of enjoyment).

To learn more from acclaimed academics, teams and institutions from the UK and Ireland, check out our latest Spotlight guide, which pulls together advice from this year’s shortlist: THE Awards 2025: lessons from the stars of UK and Irish higher education.

As centres of learning, universities should be places where ideas, opinions and beliefs can be openly discussed, challenged and interrogated. They also have a duty of care to ensure their diverse community students and staff feel safe, welcome and free from discrimination.

But some claim that an over-zealous focus on inclusion and appeasing students has led to an erosion of academic freedom and allowed a ‘cancel culture’ to dominate higher education, leading to a worrying expected conformity of opinion on important contemporary issues. This is all playing out against the wider backdrop of growing polarisation and identity politics.

For this episode, we speak to two experts in this space to find out what practical steps universities can take to encourage more constructive disagreement and engagement with differing viewpoints among students as part of their learning. And how institutions can uphold the requirements of free speech and nurture plurality across campus, while protecting those most affected by contentious issues.

You will hear from:

• Caroline Mehl, the co-founder and executive director of the Constructive Dialogue Institute, a non-profit organisation that builds educational tools to equip US higher education institutions and other organisations with skills to communicate and collaborate across differences. She founded the CDI with psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt in 2017 having previously worked as an associate research scholar and visiting scholar at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
• Abhishek Saha, a professor of mathematics at Queen Mary University of London and co-founder of the London Universities Council for Academic Freedom. Abhishek was heavily engaged in lobbying the UK government over key details of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 which came into force this year.

You can find more insight and advice on how universities can encourage respectful disagreement, while handling sensitive topics with care and protecting academic freedom in our latest spotlight guide: Dealing with division: the polarised university.