Skills identification

Hi and welcome to this session on building your skills inventory. I’m Dr Fiona McBride, a research staff developer on Prosper. By the end of this session you’ll understand what a skills inventory is and why it’s useful, be able to break down your work as a researcher into its component tasks and skills and be clear about the skills you have, and, finally, some next steps to take away so you can build your skills inventory and reflect on your skills. So let’s get started. We’ll start by answering the question what is a skills inventory. We’re defining it as a comprehensive document that contains all of your educational qualifications and professional skills. This document is a living, working document and it should be regularly updated as you go. Your skills inventory will contain all the ingredients you’ll want to have to hand to select from for job applications, when you’re writing your CV and populating your LinkedIn profile. Your skills inventory document doesn’t need to be polished or succinct. It just needs to be practical for you to easily keep updated and use when you come to apply for jobs and such like. You might be thinking, ‘But why is a skills inventory important? I can readily list my educational qualifications and I’m a highly-skilled researcher. Isn’t that enough?’ Well, it really depends on who your audience is. If you’re talking to someone and they ask what you do, you might answer, ‘I’m a researcher,’ but what they hear and understand from that statement might be different to what you want or what you expect. If they’ve been a researcher themselves or worked closely with researchers in a particular area of your specific discipline, then you may have a shared understanding of what being a researcher is and what this entails. What if the person you are talking to hasn’t had much to do with research? What if they’re from a different field entirely? You can end up talking at cross-purposes. When you say ‘research’, you may picture manuscripts and in-depth textual analysis, but they may be picturing labware and pipettes. They might not even know that you’re employed as a member of staff; they could think you’re a student. So when you say, ‘I’m a researcher,’ think about what do you want them to understand, what is the takeaway message you wish to convey about what you do. This is where having a skills inventory helps as once you’re clear on what your skills are, you can then tailor how you express these to the audience you’re talking to. The first step in creating your skills inventory is to unpack all of the skills you have as a researcher. There are a number of ways to approach this task. We’re going to start by considering how you spend your time. You may have seen these pie charts on social media, comparing the tasks a postdoc does compared to an assistant professor. They break the postdoc’s time down into five main tasks and the assistant professor’s down into 26. From their point of view, a postdoc spends the vast majority of their time working on their research with a relatively small amount of time spent on things like reading, writing and reviewing the literature and professional development. I can only comment from my own experience, but I think most postdocs work on many more tasks than the five they’ve presented here. Take a moment now just to consider if you were creating a pie chart to show the tasks you spend your time on, what would this include – how many slices or tasks would your pie chart have, what task would be the biggest slice? The largest slice on the postdoc pie chart was research, working on your project, but we can break this down even further as research is not a single activity. It’s an umbrella term and what it covers differs widely depending on the exact research project, never mind the discipline. So we can break down this monolith of ‘I’m a researcher’ by considering the individual tasks that research involves. From there we can break down these individual tasks further to uncover the skills that are used and developed to achieve them. Once you’ve got all of that information, you can reflect on them using the information that you’ve learnt or will learn about yourself through coaching and self-assessment tools to think about what tasks and skills that you’re good at, which of those do you actually like using, which would you like to continue using and which ones not so much. Are there any skills that keep coming up that you’d not really realised that you’ve been using and actually an expert in? Here we’re just going to focus on this first bit, breaking down what you do into tasks. We now suggest pausing for an activity so that you can try unpacking what you spend your time doing into tasks and even subtasks. It’s relatively easy to think of all the research-specific skills you have, but we want to ensure that you don’t overlook all the other skills you’ve got and use without realising it. There’s a downloadable task called ‘time to tasks to skills’. Take some time now to go through this and then come back to this recording. Now you’ve had a go at breaking down tasks yourself, we’re going to briefly show you a worked example. Here we’ve created a rough table starting with spaces to populate with the main tasks – those big chunky tasks that you’re responsible for. So once you’ve listed these, you can take them in turn and further break down the subtasks that each of these involve. Lastly, you can even break these down into sub-subtasks. So we started out with research, teaching and training/supervision as the main tasks, breaking these down into quite a number of subtasks and an even greater number of sub-subtasks. Once we created our list, we noticed that many of these subtasks were common across several of the main tasks. We did start to link them up, but, to be honest, this started to look a bit frantic, so we’ve not shown the links on this example. We also found that we could go one step further and start to draw out the underlying skills needed to complete the tasks. In the last column, we’ve just started to list some of the skills such as copy editing and proofreading, rapid assimilation of knowledge, the list goes on, but you can come up with your own list. This exercise really is just to start to get you thinking about your role in a different way. If you think of all those tasks you do and the associated skills needed to complete them, then when talking to someone beyond your field of research, you can now unpack and perhaps more helpfully communicate to them what being a researcher entails for you. So we’ve gone from unpacking research into specific tasks and sub-tasks, but how do we identify the skills used and what skills employers are looking for? As mentioned earlier, your research-discipline-specific skills are probably easy for you to list and the ones you might overlook are the transferable skills – an ability learnt in one context which can be applied to another. For inspiration, you could go through the skills listed in Vitae’s RDF, so the researcher development framework, or perhaps you’d like to look at Eurodoc’s transferable skills report and see the list of skills that they’ve highlighted here. So that covers the skills that researchers are expected to have, but what skills do employers want? Well, we asked them. The question we put to employers was ‘which qualities are most important for you in an employee?’ We held three workshops and these are the answers we got. As we go through these three word clouds, you’ll notice how frequently willingness to learn, collaboration, teamworking, communication and creativity appear. Our findings match pretty well with the skills highlighted by the World Economic Forum as important for the future. If you’d like to see the WEF’s full list of skills for the future, you can download this directly from their website. In addition, we asked employers ‘what makes an application stand out to you?’ This answer is just one example of what many employer partners have told us, that a long list of academic publications just doesn’t help them understand anything about you. Consider the audience getting a paper placed in that journal took. It took real graft and work on your part, but who outside of your field beyond academia would understand how important this journal is and what an achievement it is to be published there? This leads us to our next approach to unpacking your skills, now focusing on your research output. So instead of focusing earlier as we did on time, we’ll now look at a particular research output. So take a moment now, consider what does a research output look like for you. It could be a paper, it could be an editorial, a blog, arranging, hosting or presenting a conference, online events, public outreach, publishing a monograph, writing a book chapter, but the list goes on. Have a think about what this looks like for you. So what we’d like to encourage you to do now is select just one specific research output, one that’s specific to you, and help shift your focus away from just the research specifics of that output and instead think about what skills, attributes and approaches did this work need, and you can use the prompts that are given on the slide. Lastly, I’ll just give two light-hearted examples of people reframing their research to their audience. This quote is from Diana Gabaldon, author of the ‘Outlander’ sci-fi novels. She started out as a research scientist. I really like how they’ve translated their thesis title from ‘Nest site selection in pinyon jays’ to ‘Why birds build nests where they do, and who cares anyway?’ This blog post from PostGradual nicely highlights the importance of translating features, or in our case skills, into benefits for the target audience. When you’re selecting a kitchen blender, you care about the features to a small extent – how fast and powerful the motor is and what the capacity is, for example – but what will really sell that blender to you will be the benefits, translating from the bare 20-speed feature into what those 20 speeds will actually allow you to achieve in your very own kitchen. For you the first step is being clear on your skills. Once you’re clear on what skills you bring, you can begin to more clearly explain and translate these into the benefits you bring to a task, role or potential employer. The last approach we’re suggesting using to identify your skills is real-time skill spotting. We’ve created a week-long skill spotting grid where you can put the skills you’d like to look out for against the days of the week. You can input any skill you like. We’ve used some skills that we’ve selected from Eurodoc’s list of transferable skills we mentioned before. You can then simply mark the grid when you notice you’ve used that skill. It’s a good idea to jot down a note about the example that you’ve had using that skill to aid your memory when you transfer it over to your skills inventory document. At the end of the week we suggest you pause to reflect on the findings in the grid. Did you use skills you’d not even realised? Did any come up a lot? Then set yourself an action based on your reflection. For example, if there was a skill that you’d have liked to have used, but didn’t, could you find ways to bring in using it next week? Once you’ve done this, you may want to look out for a different set of skills so you can go ahead and create a new skill spotting grid for your next week of skill spotting. We’ve just set this up so that you can track your skills over a week, but feel free to modify this to a timeframe that suits you best. Alternatively, you can now have a go at using the skill spotting grid to track your confidence in any of the skills that you’ve now identified. Clearly, you can’t do this real-time skill spotting whilst watching this session, so this nicely brings us on to our next steps. If you’re looking for inspiration around transferable skills, check out the former postdoc case studies and career cluster videos on the Prosper website. Once you’ve created your skills inventory, reflect on it. What tasks and skills do you enjoy using? Do you wish you could spend time on any more of them? Capture your thoughts in your journal so you can track your progress. Lastly, why not actually have a go at using the real-time skill spotting guide that we’ve created? I’d like to thank you for your time and engaging with this session.

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My name’s Lib Golding, I work with the University of Liverpool’s careers and employability team. I’ve been with the team for about seven years now in various roles. I’m currently in the role of enterprise educator, and in that position I’m working with academic colleagues and our faculty career consultants to design modules, activities, programmes, etc., that students can get involved in to develop the skills that they need to either start a business or to contribute to the development or growth of one. So essentially giving them the opportunity to develop those high level skills that will help them make an impact in industry and hopefully progress more quickly once they’re in there as well, so it involves a lot of work liaising with employer partners as well, both locally, nationally, etc. So that’s me, today’s session is skills for the future, and marketing your postdoc experience to potential employers, so thanks very much to the Prosper team for inviting me along today. What we’ll look at in today’s session is what are the skills that are in demand by employers that are required both now and for the future world of work. I’m kind of setting the context for that a little bit as well, why the demand for certain skills may be changing over time. How you can identify which of these skills you possess and identify any gaps. Part of that application process for job opportunities, and also identifying what roles may suit you best, it’s really important to be able to identify in yourself where your strengths are, and also any areas where you may need to look at improving. So we’ll look at that as well. How you can address the gaps. We’ll reflect on the wide range of activity that I’m sure most of you have been involved in, both as part of your postdoc experience but outside of that as well, and how you can draw on new experiences to develop key skills. Hopefully this will help us recognise the fluidity of skills from the academic environment, maybe research or teaching roles in higher education, to roles beyond academia, and vice versa, and how those skills really are transferrable. Importantly today as well, how do you market those skills and your postdoc experience to potential employers, whoever those employers may be. We’ll have a look at the recruitment process, the different steps of a typical recruitment process, how you can really evidence your skills and suitability to employers, but also how you can promote yourself and market your experience and your suitability, even outside of the recruitment process. That’s something that we could all be doing at any given point. When we’re thinking about transferrable skills and those softer skills if you like, are they really that soft? What we mean by that is, often people will look at the technical skills required for a role, the hard experience that you need to even make it through that first stage of the application process, but any job specification, any role description will require you to have some skills that will make you a suitable candidate that aren’t just those technical and hard skills. These are extremely important, and the thing about transferrable skills is once you’re gaining and developing them, you really can take them with you on your career journey. What we’ll see today is that a lot of the skills that are trending now in 2022 and for the future world of work are coming off in role descriptions for a range of different roles, be that in industry or in the academic environment. I really enjoy this quote from the Confederation of British Industry. Employers focus above all on the attitudes and aptitudes that will enable employees to be effective in the workplace. This is by far the most widely cited consideration. Skills mobility will be essential in a future economy where jobs rise and fall with each new technological wave. One way we can look at this is in order to almost futureproof yourself as a candidate, as an applicant, focusing on soft skills is a great way to do this, and those transferrable skills. Even if some of you are thinking you don’t actually know what you’d like to do on completion of your postdoc, if you’re not sure what areas of your career you’d like to go into, focusing on those transferrable skills is a really good way to do something proactive and something that you can work at over time. Just some more labour market information and data here then, so looking at the World Economic Forum top ten skills. Thinking about what maybe is declining over time, so maybe those more manual skills, those more basic administrative responsibilities, things like manual dexterity, quality control, coordination, that type of thing. Then what is trending for 2022, so this data is from 2018, so it’s interesting to look at it now that we are in 2022, and also map that with more recent data, which we’ll look at shortly. The predictions for 2022 were things like active learning and learning strategies. For me that really means taking responsibility of your own skill development, professional curiosity, and seeking out opportunities to develop professionally. Analytical thinking and innovation, so creativity, originality, and innovation. It’s all that problem solving piece, thinking outside of the box, coming up with new ideas. Again initiative is trending, taking responsibility, proactivity, being able to carry out a task without direct supervision. Problem solving again we’ve seen there, and leadership. So a lot of these skills underpin leadership, so things like critical thinking, problem solving, emotional intelligence, all of those things are needed to be an effective leader. Again revisiting the World Economic Forum, trending in 2020, those skills, very similar list here. Complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity is there again. Cognitive flexibility, so adaptability, being able to adapt to changing ways of working, taking on different roles and duties and responsibilities. Cognitive flexibility also aligning quite closely to things like resilience, so being able to overcome a setback, deal with barriers, things not going according to plan, and adjusting our ways of working and being able to overcome those setbacks as well. I really like this chart on the right here from the QS intelligence report in 2018, which is looking at the key skills that employers are telling us that they want. These are employers from industry across a range of sectors. They’re telling us that they are looking for these key skills, and the important score is that lighter blue colour. So if we’re problem solving, which is the skill that’s ranking the most highly here, 96 on that scale of zero to 100, so really quite highly. Things like adaptability ranking highly as well, resilience which we’ve also seen, creativity also. Then the satisfaction score, so that darker teal blue colour. We can see that for some of the skills that are ranked highly, the satisfaction score is significantly lower, so problem solving again is a good example for that. 96 dropping to 67 when employees are telling us just how satisfied they are with a candidate’s ability to demonstrate that skill. Similarly with creativity that’s a big drop, as with adaptability, negotiation and effective communication. What this tells us is that in a competitive jobs market, if you are able to evidence and demonstrate, be it on your application form, at interview, or outside of the recruitment process altogether, if you can demonstrate and evidence that you have these skills, you really are going to give yourself a competitive edge, and these are the skills that employers are really looking to see in applicants. Again the future of jobs survey, just to really highlight here that the same skills are coming up time and time again. Complex problem solving, active learning strategies, creativity, originality. The Institute of Student Employers, so the ISE works with over 500 member organisations, and although they look primarily at supporting employers with their graduate and student attraction campaigns and developing opportunities for students and graduates, they do a lot of data which is surveying their members on their recruitment as a whole. Looking at things like how they recruit and what methods they’re using, but also things like skills gaps over time and where employers are really seeing a lack in new talent coming through, and what gaps they’re trying to fill. This list here has been provided by ISE. Their members again cover a range of sectors. The top four represented, Deloitte, PWC, but also the NHS Leadership Academy, the BBC, British Airways, AstraZeneca, so big, national, global employers. Again similar skills coming up here, commercial awareness is there again, resilience, problem solving, negotiation and effective communication.[END OF TRANSCRIPT]

So why are we seeing these trends? Why are we seeing a big focus on what I consider to be enterprising skills? So skills that are required to opportunity spot, to problem solve, to make an impact and make a difference. The skills that enable us to be adaptable and to upskill. So resilience, cognitive flexibility, initiative. We can attribute this to the fact that the world of work is changing rapidly. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s never stood still, so to speak; but over the last decade or so, we’ve seen a period of significant change in the external environment and within the internal ways in which employers are working. We think of things like political considerations and the economic impact that can have for the way that employers and different organisations are operating. So things like Brexit, changes in trade agreements, political agreements which is impacting how different countries and businesses operate. We saw when Brexit came to the fold, a lot of employers telling us that they were worried about how they would recruit and retain talent as a result of that. Now, myself and my team in careers employability work with a lot of employers and they are telling us that they are experiencing things like supply issues; but also retaining talent in some sectors, specifically in the life sciences industries, for example. There has been a concern around how we retain that talent in the UK. The way we work in its simplest form, how we actually carry out our work day-to-day is changing. Now, digitalisation, the rise in artificial intelligence and virtual reality was having an impact on this even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic; but the pandemic has almost accelerated this. More of us now than ever are working from home, which is changing the ways in which employers work and how organisations operate; but also their recruitment practices as well. You are now more likely to be eligible to apply for an organisation outside of where you’re actually based; so you might be based in the south of England, but opportunities in the north have become more open to you. Obviously, the way that the UK is structured, certain sectors are more prevalent in different areas, so this has really opened up the way that employers recruit; but also opportunities. Just job opportunities in general, with that increase in technology, I remember reading articles, five, ten years ago, around the rise of artificial intelligence and virtual reality and what would that actually mean? Are people going to be out of work? Well, yes, certain jobs are becoming obsolete, are being replaced by different jobs; but the demand for highly skilled individuals is higher now than it ever has been, and we are finding that this increase in technology is actually creating more roles than it is replacing. So all of that is really interesting and having an impact on what employers are looking for. They want individuals, as we’ve seen from the data, who can be proactive, who are resilient, who can adapt to change. Things like the gig economy as well; again, this was on the rise prior to the pandemic, but even more so now. Now, more than ever, people have more than one occupation. We’ve seen the rise of people having two, three, four different jobs and really having portfolio careers. The jobs market in the UK is very non-linear. We’re always saying to our students and graduates in my team that over 70 per cent of graduate level, and when we say graduate level, we’re really just talking of those highly skilled occupations, over 70 per cent are open to applicants from any degree background. So you could be a history masters or PhD and want to go into finance; you could have a marketing background and want to go into pharmaceutical sales; we are seeing people with lab backgrounds going into consultancy and those type of roles. So the way in which people are picking up new opportunities and maybe balancing different jobs at once as well is on the rise; as is the rise of entrepreneurship as well. Slightly disrupted by the pandemic, but now more than ever people are having a side hustle which they’re making some kind of monetary income from, or actually starting their own business. So lots of change, lots of exciting developments, impact from external things, pandemics, different crises, political considerations, but also technology really forcing this change, and leading, as we’ve seen from the data, to employers wanting individuals who can rise to that challenge and who can upskill and can navigate those changes. Don’t just take my word for it, and the labour market information, here is proof that those transferable skills really do matter. These are taken directly from person specifications and job descriptions for roles in industry. As you can see, we’ve got different sectors represented here, so FDM, an IT consultancy; we’ve got Philips, who recruit for a range of roles, everything from marketing, business development, sales and tech roles as well of course; GSK, pharma, but, again, the breadth of roles that they recruit for, account management, marketing, and obviously lab-based roles as well. Aside from those hard technical skills that employers are recruiting for in the job description, and maybe relevant experience in a similar industry, the transferable skills are littered through the whole person specification. We can see here ‘You will demonstrate a high level of energy, drive and passion.’ Now, for me, that is just another way of saying proactivity and initiative. ‘You will be adaptable and take ownership,’ again being resilient, being able to turn your hand to different things, upskill, pick up things quickly. For example, ‘positive, enthusiastic and passionate about change;’ ‘taking ownership, proactive approach, communicate ideas with clarity.’ Employers want to bring in individuals who have ideas, who can set the vision, who can problem solve, and be innovative; they want evidence of creativity, as we can see in the top here, ‘a flair for creativity and innovation, taking initiative, problem solving, working well under pressure.’ So not only is that time management, but it is also that cognitive flexibility, adaptability, resilience. Here as well, ‘actively seeks to enhance own expertise and knowledge,’ and we’re seeing this time and time again, employers want evidence of a commitment of your own CPD and upskilling, continuously trying to develop the key skills that are needed now and for the future, many of which you will already have in your skill suitcase, if you like; but also lots of ways to develop them along the way also. Outside of industry, within academia and the higher education environment, we’re seeing this as well. Again, specific knowledge and experience in certain academic fields is likely to be required; but these are posts in higher education institutions, in different either lecturing or teaching or research roles, yet at different universities, different types of universities, in different areas, but the commonality we are seeing is that focus on proactivity, a positive attitude, demonstrating creativity, initiative and decision-making and judgement. Again, as we’re seeing here, ‘commitment to personal development and updating of knowledge and skills, effective leadership, management, etc.’ So outside of industry, these skills are required. So wherever you feel your career is going to take you, maybe you already have in mind where you’d like to end up, or you’re considering that at the moment, something that you can do which is going to guarantee to be useful regardless is developing those transferable skills and that commitment to lifelong learning and upskilling. So we see a lot of skills mentioned both in the labour market data, those employer surveys, and also on the job descriptions and person specs. For me, the ones that we’ve seen probably coming out time and time again for now and in the future commercial awareness. So that is knowledge of the sector and the business and knowledge of the company that you’re applying to; but also the industry and the sector in which they operate. What is happening in that space? What has been achieved in the company over the past five to ten years? What are the strengths of the business? What are the weaknesses of the business in the industry as well? What opportunities for growth are there? Also what’s threatening the success of that sector and that company? So that knowledge and that commercial awareness is really important. That goes for roles within the higher education and academic environment as well. So if you apply for a lecturing or research post at a different institution, you still need to demonstrate commercial awareness and awareness of that institution and that employer. So even though it’s still higher education or academia, do you know what their vision is for the next five to ten years? It’s going to be different for every employer, every institution. What is their learning and teaching strategy? What is their curriculum framework? All of that will be quite unique to a specific institution. Resilience and adaptability we’re seeing coming up a lot. Again, to really bring in individuals who can adapt to a range of tasks and responsibilities within a role; but also adapt well to change, new technologies, new ways of working, working across different sectors, different departments within an organisation. Initiative, that proactivity, creativity, innovation and problem solving, bringing ideas to the table, thinking outside of the box, and coming up with ideas for fresh ways of working. Generating business, spotting opportunities, and that could be generating business in a real business type environment in industry; but also in the academic environment, generating opportunities for collaboration, for new teaching practices, for new research opportunities. Professional curiosity driving a commitment to ongoing learning and skill development, that is something that we’re hearing from employers time and time again; that proactivity, evidence of taking on additional responsibilities, perhaps outside of the remit of your immediate role, but showing a real interest and genuine curiosity for the sector. We call these enterprise skills because they are those skills that underpin an entrepreneurial mindset, and perhaps a bit of a buzzword, we’re hearing this a lot now, very much like a growth mindset; but employers are telling us this is what they want to see. They want to bring in applicants who can spot opportunities, who can make change happen, and who are contributing to the success but the growth of the business as well and making things happen. [END OF TRANSCRIPT]

A bit of a busy slide this one, but just to really give you an insight of a lot of the things you will have done in your postdoc experience, and it can be a hard process to really think about the breadth of experience that we’ve gained and developed. Sometimes through studying research, or in paid employment, we have our head down and we’re getting on with it, we’re really just focusing on doing a good job, that when it comes to reflecting on our achievements, we sometimes undersell or we forget what we’ve done and what we’ve achieved. But through your postdoc experience, you will have gained so many transferable skills, and what is good practice is to do almost a skills audit. Now, some of you may do this already, but it really should be an ongoing process. We are gaining and developing new skills, new experiences all of the time, every day, so really, this should be something that you update frequently as you move through your experience, and it takes time. You do need to take time out and reflect on what you’ve done, both as part of your postdoc experience but also prior to that as well, but thinking primarily in your current experience and the things that we know employers are looking for. So employers may ask for things like an excellent academic record. Well, that’s an easy one, you’ll all have evidence of that. Strong technical skills. That’s going to be very different for the different roles that you’re looking at, but that’s experience which is very relevant to the role or the post. So you might think about experience with specific equipment, processes, maybe through placements, employment, research, whatever it might be. Those enhanced communication skills and that’s negotiation, influencing, that type of thing. Think about all the times that you’ve had to communicate with different individuals, maybe across cultural barriers, communicating with people with different levels of knowledge and expertise as yourself. Any time you’re ever involved in a conference, teaching, maybe your written communication, any kind of public engagement activities you’ve done, or disseminating research findings or findings to funders, etc. Using your initiative. Any time you’ve had to source funding that hasn’t necessarily been available, any time you’ve implemented change or improved ways of working, maybe you’ve suggested opportunities for collaborations. Any roles that you’ve taken on outside of immediate job shows initiative. Leadership. Now to show capabilities and leadership potential and to demonstrate the skills required for leadership, you don’t necessarily have to have been in a management position. You don’t necessarily have to have managed or led a team to show that you are capable of doing that, but what you can show is that you’ve had the vision and had the foresight. So maybe you have run a research project or group. Maybe you’ve been some kind of rep, you’ve been a committee leader or you’ve supervised some members of the team. Even things like showing emotional intelligence when working with others, things like active learning, and again, effective communication. All of these skills really are useful for leadership and demonstrate good leadership capability. So commercial awareness is required for leadership, but also things like problem solving, adaptability, and again, good communication. Commercial awareness. Any time you’ve dealt with industry or you’ve dealt with funding or you’ve attended conferences and delivered, anything like that. Self-management and resilience, I’m sure all of you will have this in spades. Making things happen, persistence and vision to continue with the project, be that a more practical project or a research project. Things like navigating fixed-term projects where funding might be limited or you’re limited on resource, you might be on a fixed-term contract, jumping to different contracts, showing self-management and resilience. Being comfortable with uncertainty. Again, emotional intelligence, adapting to the research environment and to industry, that transferability. Evidence of applying your research in a different context, so maybe taking research that have been developed in an academic environment to industry or outside of the academy, and also, balancing a range of commitments and pressures on your time shows very strong, adaptable, flexible, cognitive flexibility competencies. Problem solving and idea generation and innovation and creativity we’ve seen come up a lot today, and this is probably something that I find candidates automatically feel that they may be lacking. Things like creativity, people automatically think, I’m not a natural creative individual, but creativity really is just thinking outside of the box and being innovative. It’s not necessarily whether you play a musical instrument or whether you can draw. We all have the capacity to be creative. It’s true that some of us, the way we think and the way we operate may lend itself to be creative more than others, but we do all have that capacity for creativity. So it’s reflecting on what we may have done over time, which demonstrates that to potential employers. Negotiating, debating, influencing. Any time you’ve had to defend your research, source new opportunities, develop relationships, collaborate, anything like that. Even things like your viva or defending project funding or negotiating extensions to contracts and funding and things like that. That could be in a verbal or a written format, and of course, time management. Managing the research timetable, other commitments, multiple projects and responsibilities, working to tight deadlines, having to maybe pivot when things go wrong, so then having to look again at how you’re managing your time. All of these things coming up in those labour market and employer data has been in high demand, regardless of the sector, the industry and the nature of the role. Also, take time to think about activities you’ve undertaken beyond your postdoc experience. You have gained and developed skills through a wide range of additional experiences and employers are always keen to hear and have examples from a range of different avenues. So it’s fantastic if you’ve undertaken a project or been in a situation where you’ve got a lot of examples of these skills, and we would always recommend that you use your best examples where possible, your strongest examples where that skill is really highly demonstrated and the impact is very, very evident. However, employers do like evidence from different places, different experiences, and it all comes into that storytelling piece as well. When you are in an interview, when you are maybe at an assessment day or in a selection type environment, if you can really bring to life your experiences. So if you think about previous employment, roles that you’ve had prior to your postdoc, you might find that some of your best examples do come from different avenues. Volunteering is one that we know employers are always keen to hear about. Volunteering is a great one and I always say to candidates that sometimes the freedom and the breadth of responsibility you get through volunteering roles is really quite unique. You have a lot of scope to recommend things. Often you can say, actually, I’d quite like to be involved in this, is this possible? You can often implement a lot of change and have quite high impact quite quickly in volunteering roles. So think about maybe any volunteering you’ve been involved in and how you’ve developed any of these key skills through that. Committees, societies, roles with professional bodies. Again, these don’t have to have been as part of your postdoc. These could be things that you have on the side. Personal interests, things that you were involved in prior to your postdoc. Any training courses and CPD. I’m sure all of you will have been involved in some kind of additional training courses. These may have been quite formal, a formal requirement of your research or your role, but also think about how you can undertake training courses in CPD outside of your postdoc for your own professional development, your own personal and professional development. There has been a significant rise in online training courses in CPD, which are really very accessible, so LinkedIn Learning, for example, is open to all University of Liverpool students and staff, for example, and a lot of other institutions offer that as well. You can do a range of courses, anything from an introduction to coding to leadership courses, emotional intelligence, things like unconscious bias. There’s such a range of things out there. Courses like FutureLearn, there’s lots available, often free of charge as well, and also your hobbies, sports, interest groups, anything like that. Any responsibilities that you might take on through them, really good examples of those transferable skills.

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One of the key skills that was coming up… Well, you could look at it as a skill, it could also be seen as an attribute or a competency but is commercial awareness and this commercial awareness is so important for being successful in the application process because it’s one of the attributes that really is tested at so many stages. So, when you’re submitting a cover letter, for example, you need to talk about why you’re suitable and why you are a strong candidate, but also why you are attracted to that employer and that company. So, even at that very stage you need to show an understanding of the organisation and the sector. You’re likely to be asked questions at interview around what you think is the biggest threat or weakness of our organisation at the moment, or why you’re keen to join this company. What opportunities you think are likely to come up. What have we done recently in the past ten years that has impressed you? That’s all commercial awareness and knowledge of the sector, the industry, and the employer. So, when you are making applications, it’s important to think about things like the size and structure of the company, key people, what are their key products and services. Again, that goes for goals in academia as well in higher education. Each institution is different so the programmes that they deliver will be different, the cohort students that they have will be different, their vision will be very different. Recent financial performance, major competitors, what is their future strategy and mission statement, and also thinking outside of the immediate business as well and the wider sector. So, any changes in the external environment. You’re likely to get questions, for example, when applying for roles in higher education. What are the biggest factors impacting the student experience at the moment? That might not necessarily be down to individual institutions. It could be things like changes in Government policy, with what places are available for certain programmes; student loans; issues facing students in general. So, knowledge of the wider sector – really important.  Where can you find this information? Well, employers aren’t necessarily trying to trip you up. A lot of the time they want you to have this information. Usually, it’s something that they’re quite happy to shout about, especially if it’s positive. So, good news, company websites. They’re likely to have things like an annual report which will look at things like the culture and values of the organisation. A great one to look at if you’re trying to explain why an employer is a good fit for yourself. Again, it’s all about your career exploration, as well. So, it’s not just thinking, right, I like this culture… sorry, I know what the culture is, I know what the values are of the organisation, I can sell that at interview. I can show that I’ve done my research. It’s for you as an applicant to work out whether the culture and the values of that organisation is right for you, if the aims and objectives of that company are right for yourself. So, all of these things are usually, more often than not, available on the company website. However, to dig a little bit deeper, there’s lots of business intelligence information in databases online, periodicals, newspapers and in the media as well. So, things like Marketline, FAME, Mintel. These are all sources of business intelligence where you can look at different organisations, see how they’re performing, look at information about employees, their financial information, competitor information, and also the latest news. What have they achieved? What new products and services have they launched? And you can also follow companies’ social media pages for real, fresh, up to date information on this as well. Sometimes these business intelligence sites will have done a bit of a SWOT analysis for you already. The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing the business, which is great to inform your application and interview question responses. And also things like a PESTLE analysis as well, looking at that external piece, the political, economic, sociological, technological, legal, and environmental factors which may impact the performance of a business. So, these databases are open access for University of Liverpool staff and it’s probably likely that your own institution will have open access as well. So, do access those databases for your own research for career planning and career decision making, but also when making applications.

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Now looking at really articulating your skills and how you sell yourself through employers, the application process now really has moved away from submitting a CV, and maybe being invited in for an interview, or a phone call. A lot of application processes are quite drawn-out now, especially for roles outside of academia. So it’s likely that your initial application will be a CV, or an online application form, or more common now then ever, a link to your LinkedIn profile, where you’re kind of giving the employer the information they need to know about your experience and your relevant skills. Then perhaps you’ll be called for an informal telephone interview. Maybe you’ll be invited in for a chat, but it’s also likely that you might be invited for a video interview. Research that was done last year by the Institute of Student Employers, is showing that about 70 per cent of their members are going more digital with their recruitment processes. We were seeing this pre-pandemic, the rise of video interviews, and online tests, and online assessment centres as well, for lots of reasons, and one without a doubt being the fact that it’s cost-effective for employers to be able to send you a link to an online video interview, which you will complete in your own time. You’ll literally look at a screen, the questions will come up, you’ll respond to those interview questions, and then that will be reviewed offline, and you’ll be sent feedback at a following date. It’s less resource intensive for employers. They don’t need to think about booking out a day where candidates come into the office, etc. There’s lots of different stages to the application process where you can really demonstrate your skills. On application forms, in interviews where you’re looking at strength-based questions, where you’re being asked about your skills and competencies, but also motivational questions as well. Why do you want to work for this company? What do you know about us? Why this role? So that’s something to bear in mind when you are marketing yourself, every step of the application process is an opportunity to develop the skills required for the job. It’s all about leveraging your skills to convince employers that you’re a suitable candidate. This will be a different process for every role you apply for. No CV or application form fits all. It needs to be amended and tweaked for every role that you apply for. So you need to look at the job description and person spec for the role at hand, and think about what skills, experience, and knowledge they’re asking for, and in your application, demonstrate those skills. You may have a million other skills that you’re really strong in and you’ve got great examples for. Employers are shortlisting and recruiting based on what is required for that role at hand. So tailor your application, and tailor your interview questions to what they are actually asking for for that role. You may find that some job descriptions and person specifications are a bit thin on the ground, and you’d like more detail. By all means request that. If it’s not available have a think about whether you’ve got any contacts in that organisation or a similar one within the sector, who may be able to shed a light on what is required for specific roles, and what skills and experience will come in useful. Think about your own professional network, your LinkedIn network, alumni from your institutions, or previous institutions, can they give you an insight. Also online research. So prospects.ac.uk is a great site for looking at different job profiles. It provides the summary of the key roles and responsibilities associated with an occupation, but also usually the key skills that you need for it as well. Vitae career stories is another great way to look at this as well, with individuals sharing what skills and what experience they use regularly in their role. So think about what examples you have. Hopefully using a skills audit that you may have already been working on. Again I can’t stress enough how valuable that is because sometimes you’ll see a job opening and it might close in a day or two. If you’ve got a document to hand where you’ve already started mapping examples from previous experiences, that demonstrate these skills, half of that battle of that application process is done for you. If applicable show how your skills translate to business and industry beyond academia, if you are applying for roles outside of industry. Again the best way to do that is looking really closely at the job description, and the skills and experience they’re looking for. Ensure your responses are clear and easy to follow. Don’t make it difficult for the employer. Be very, very clear, and use a framework which we use, a STAR technique, which I’ll show you in the moment, to really structure your responses clearly. That goes in a written form for online application forms, but also verbally in the interview process as well. Use powerful language that show impact. What was your role? What did you do? What was a positive outcome? So it really is a mapping exercise using your best examples but also a variety of examples. If an employer is looking for a skill where you actually feel you may be a little bit weaker, hopefully through this process following today, you will have identified areas for development, and you can start working on them right away. If you are making an application, and maybe you are limited in an area they’re looking for, give as much evidence as you can to what extent you do possess that skill, but also talk about maybe how you’re working on developing that area, and what you are doing now, or intending to do to fill that gap. Again it’s showing that proactivity, that you’re a lifelong learner, that you are constantly looking at your development, and also that you understand what is needed for the role, you haven’t left it off because you don’t possess that skill, but really because you are going to include it because you’re working on it at the moment. So the best answers are based around solid examples, real, tangible examples that have actually taken place. They follow a clear structure; they evidence your skills and your contribution clearly. So even if it’s a role you played as part of a team, or a group, or it is a collaborative project, really emphasise your contribution. Think impact and also show your learning and reflection. So if you’re given an example of a time you developed a skill, tag on the end of that example that actually that went really well. If I was to do this again, I’d also include this. Or although things went to plan, and the outcome was positive, to further enhance this next time I’m in this situation, I would do X. Again it’s showing that you’re reflective, you can implement change, and you are committed to ongoing improvement. The STAR technique, I feel like we’ve been talking about this for a long time in the world of careers employability, but it’s still so valid. Employers on their website, when they’re sharing their application packs, and details of how they recruit, they’re still talking about the STAR technique. They’re still recommending that applicants use it. It’s on the NHS website for example. You may wish to use this framework. So when you’re evidencing your skills and competencies, that you’ve found on the job description, set the scene, introduce the situation you’re in, and talk about the task at hand. What you did, what the expectations were of you. This is the shorter part of your response. So if we were thinking of a written response on an application form, this’ll be a line for each perhaps. The bulk of your response should be action and result. Explain what you did and how you did it. What did you actually carry out, because this is where you’re actually giving evidence of the skill, what you actually did. Then the result. So R for result but also R for reflection. What did you do? What was the outcome? What was the positive impact of your action? Also what would you perhaps do differently in the future? Finally looking at marketing your skills and experience outside of the application process. So it’s all good and well when you come to applying for a role. You’re going through all of those stages. You’ve got hopefully a bit of an audit of your skills and experience. You’re looking at the job description and person spec. You’re thinking about things you’ve done as part of your postdoc and beyond, and you’re going to really move your way through that application process. What about before you’re applying for opportunities, and when you’re not actually making formal applications? You could be marketing your skills and experience now, and this is about thinking about your personal brand. Again perhaps careers employability jargon here, but it is something that employers are tapping into, and they want to see evidence of your suitability, and what makes you stand out, outside of the rigidity of the application process. So what is your personal brand? It’s the unique combination of skills and experiences that make you who you are. So although between us we may have shared skills, shared competencies, our evidence and examples of them will be very different, and the activities and experiences we’ve engaged in will be different too. We’ll all have different previous employment. We’ll all have different hobbies, or additional roles that we do outside of paid employment. It’s how you present yourself to the world. Effective personal branding does differentiate you from the competition and allows you to build trust with prospective employers. It’s you having control over what you show to employers and giving them an in to see you at your most authentic and bring a bit of personality into the application process as well. Initially when they first see that CV, or that application form, it’s quite hard to bring in personality, but if you’re giving a link to your LinkedIn profile, or if they can find you via your Twitter handle, or something like that; have a think about that. So it’s about doing it right. Now we’re just going to have a look at how you can really raise your brand identity and your personal brand online, but also think about what you definitely shouldn’t do. I think good practice sometimes can be actually just googling yourself. Put your name into a search engine, what comes up? Is anything accessible that you wouldn’t want to be? So you need to revisit any skeletons in the closet. Do you need to do any clean-up of your social media channels or anything like that. Use those things to your advantage because over 70 per cent of employees are using social and professional networking sites. A few years ago, I was seeing employers, on application forms, ‘Insert link to your LinkedIn profile here.’ Or, ‘Any online media that you’d like to share with the hiring team, upload here.’ LinkedIn really is a must. The hidden jobs market that we call it, over 65 per cent of roles and opportunities now are never openly advertised. They are recruited by word of mouth, recommendation. They might never go out for a live advert for you to apply for. So you really have to be in it to win it with this. Keeping your LinkedIn up to date, sharing details of your achievements and your successes, and keeping your online profile a really professional image. So showcase all of your experiences online. Anything that you’re doing, any collaboration with other individuals, maybe if you’ve got a blog, or you’re publishing articles, if you want grant funding, it’s self-promotion. I know it doesn’t necessarily come easy to a lot of us. It can feel a bit cringy and a bit awkward, but other people are doing it. They are doing it and they are standing out from the crowd, so in order to be part of that, make sure that you are joining that conversation. Showcase your key achievements. Follow the right individuals on LinkedIn and Twitter. Really highlight your successes and things that make you stand out. Things like LinkedIn recommendations. Write recommendations for your colleagues, and your peers, and people you’ve worked with. They may write you a recommendation in return. These things can make a difference. You can also add skills to your LinkedIn profile, where you can highlight the key skills that you possess, and individuals can endorse you for those skills. So I might say, right, Lib Golding has got experience in module design, and some of my peers, and my colleagues can endorse me for that skill and say, yes, I know she has done that, we’ve been involved in that together. Again, it enhances your credibility. It can help make you stand out. LinkedIn really is quite intuitive as well. So if you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, or you think that yours needs work, log on, get started, and it will talk you through the different stages, and it will show you on a scale of how complete your LinkedIn profile is, and where you need to develop, what sections you need to develop. So actually I guess if there was one takeaway from today, I would recommend looking at your online profile, looking at LinkedIn, and maybe getting going and starting with that kind of skills audit process. I just wanted to end on this quote, again from the World Economic Forum, ‘For workers there’s an unquestionable need to take personal responsibility to take responsibility for one’s lifelong learning and career development.’ It’s likely that there will be phases of retraining and upskilling by governments and employers as all of these changes happen. So employers are looking for individuals who will voluntarily undergo periodic skills upgrading. So if you can show your development of skills over time to date, it’s really going to make you stand out as an attractive candidate, and get working on filling those gaps, be it with online courses, taking up new opportunities, volunteering, whatever it might be. Get started on working on those skills and those gaps, so you can really market yourself effectively to employers.

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