Identifying transferable skills through postgraduate research activities
Verbal communication
- Giving presentations at university, conferences etc
- Receiving positive feedback and further invitations
- Leading dynamic lectures and seminars which received good student (and peer) evaluations
Written communication
- Producing work, including presentations to deadlines, at short notice
- Report writing
- Writing up and publishing research
- Making a successful grant proposal
Interpersonal skills
- Developing a team member
- Motivating others within the research team to achieve positive results
- Supervising (almost as good as managing!)
- Delegating
- Mentoring
- Influencing
- Negotiation/persuasion
- Networking
- Qualitative research involving interviews
Numeracy
- Planning a budget
- Writing a successful funding application, including a planned budget. Keeping project to budget, maintaining accounts
- Drawing up statistical charts from your research
Information technology
- Designing a successful multimedia presentation
- Developing a computer programme
- Developing a database to store research findings
- Experience of specialist IT packages, eg. SPSS, Minitab, Genstat etc.
- Other IT skills such as spreadsheets, word processing, database use, webpage design etc. Do not assume that "everyone has these now".
Reasoning
- Solving a problem in your research leading to successful result and publication
- Developing a theoretical model from your experience/research
Note that this list of skills relates to your research activities, but of course you will have developed skills outside research for example through any work that you have done (paid or unpaid) or hobbies that you have.
