Introducing My Skills
There are lots of opportunities to embed skills development in your learning and teaching practices using the Bristol Skills Profile.
As part of the Bristol Skills Profile, we’ve launched an online platform to help students identify their strengths and areas for development, reflect on their skills and experiences, and track their growth. The My Skills platform can be accessed by all students and recent graduates to help them with their skills development. From launch until February, over 2200 users had engaged with the platform.
In this blog, we’re going to explore the main areas of My Skills and how we can embed activities relating to the platform in the curriculum.
Skills Check
The first section of the platform is the skills check. Each of the nine skills in the Bristol Skills Profile are represented in this survey, which gets students thinking about their proficiency in that area. The check can help students reflect on the skills they’ve developed in your unit in a structured way, and in the context of their wider development as a student.
The results of the survey feed into the rest of the functions on My Skills. Therefore, students must complete the survey at least once before being able to access the rest of the resources here. The survey takes about 10-15 minutes to complete.
Some schools have already started using the skills check as part of their units to give students a structured reflection time. You could put some time aside at the end of a unit for students to complete the check to see how far they’ve developed specific skills, for instance.
Skills Profile
Once students have completed the check, they can view their skills profile. This summarises the results of the check, highlighting proficiencies in the nine skills. They can now pin skills they want to develop to a “skills in development” section at the top of the page. They can also find pathways to improve these skills, and add experiences to their skills logs.
You could get students to share their skills profile in a personal tutor meeting to structure a discussion around recent personal development and opportunities for future growth. Tutors could then encourage students to try using pathways to structure their development or highlight activities coming up on the course that will help them work on this area.
The pathways have been curated with resources from different experts across the University. For example, Dave Jarman, Associate Professor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, has contributed to pathways in knowledge handling skills, and Faculty Librarians James Webley & Naomi Nile have contributed to pathways in research skills. The pathways also signpost other activities from the careers service, including CV workshops, Bristol PLUS and more.
My History
The great thing about the skills check is that students can complete it as many times as they like. Once they have completed it a second time, they can then compare how they’ve developed in different skills areas over time. Under “my history”, they can select any two different checks to compare proficiencies in different areas. This function really helps students to start reflecting on their personal development.
If you’ve already planned to complete the skills check at the end of a unit, why not also put time aside at the start of the unit so students can see their own growth during the teaching. You could then set an activity to help students identify why they’ve developed in certain areas, or why they feel less confident if scores have gone down. Try to get them to attribute changes to specific activities they’ve done between assessments to evidence their growth.
Management Reflection and Development in Practise, an 80-hour placement unit in the Business School, already uses My History in their teaching. By completing the check before and after the placement, students can see how they have developed during that time. This will include their placement experiences and anything else they’re doing in the same period of time.
Skills Logs
The final main area of My Skills is the skills logs. This section allows students to write about the different experiences they’ve had and the skills they’ve used during these experiences. They can talk about paid work, internships, volunteering, student leadership roles and activities during their course. They can also add any of the Bristol Skills Profile skills to an experience and any other skills they’ve used.
If you want to get students thinking more about the experiences they’ve had, you could use the skills logs section to structure activities. For example, you could get students to work in small groups to identify things they’ve done and write them up on their skills logs. This could be as part of a lecture, seminar or personal tutor meeting.
When different experiences have been added, it becomes a valuable list of all of their experiences to help them tailor a CV to a job they are applying for. Read more about reflective thinking and how My Skills connects to this on our reflective thinking resource.
Students can export what they write
Skills logs and my history can be exported, meaning you can build My Skills activities into summative or formative assessments. If you’re asking for reflective pieces about a placement, for instance, you could get students to submit their skills logs export as well.
Everything can be accessed after graduation…
My Skills can be accessed for three years after students graduate. This means that they can continue to access the skills logs section and add more experiences. They can also export their results to use in the future.
…and if you’re a staff member.
Staff can also access My Skills. All you need to do is log into mycareer using the “staff sign in and registration” button and access My Skills by clicking on “skills”. It’s worth trying it out if you want to know more about what students can do with the platform, or test something out before you use it in your teaching.
Find out more
- Access My Skills and explore the platform
- Read more about the Bristol Skills Profile on our recent blog.
- Speak to your school’s representative from the Faculty Employability Team if you have any questions about using My Skills in your teaching.
