Graduate employability is a key issue for higher education as new graduates face a highly competitive and rapidly changing employment sector. To maximise their likelihood of employment, graduates need to be able to demonstrate the skills and attributes most valued by employers. Employers, however, have long criticised the ability of graduates to…

Problem solving has been characterized as one of the 'employability skills' due to the high demand for such abilities in a modern workplace. Most universities do not monitor progress of the generic problem-solving skills (PSS) of their students due to a lack of available assessment tools. We used previously reported 15-min tests to measure the…

Higher education institutions increasingly recognise the need to develop both disciplinary knowledge and soft skills to foster the employability of their graduates. For students in International Studies programmes, the workplace opportunities to develop soft skills relevant to their intended professions are scarce, costly and unavailable to many.…

For higher education graduates to be effective in the workplace, they require strong technical skills and the capability to operate across diverse knowledge landscapes to solve real world problems. At an Australian university, an interdisciplinary, short-term study tour programme was utilised to enhance students' inexplicit employability skills…

With increasing complexity in the world, universities continue to face pressure to demonstrate that their graduates have acquired skills beyond discipline-based knowledge. These are generic skills like critical thinking, intellectual curiosity, problem-solving and so forth. In order to demonstrate this, universities have to show how their teaching…

The development of generic capabilities or graduate attributes in communication, teamwork, critical analysis of information, problem solving and ethical practice is widely recognised as a desired outcome of higher education. This emphasis on generic capabilities has emerged despite ongoing debates about the concept and development of such…

Graduate capabilities are an essential aspect of undergraduate development in higher education. Accordingly, La Trobe University's "Design for learning" has identified particular university-wide graduate capabilities and required all faculties to explicitly embed these in their curricula. The Faculty of Law and Management developed an approach to…

Pragmatic social constructivist teaching methods require students to construct knowledge by engaging collaboratively with realistic problems, cases or projects. It is hypothesized that they are more effective than traditional didactic teaching methods in developing undergraduate students': (1) theoretical knowledge; (2) profession-specific skills;…

A study investigated the effects on students' nonverbal intelligence of implementing an approach to higher education based on Vedic science, developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and including transcendental meditation. The approach was implemented in two Cambodian universities and its effects assessed in 70 undergraduate students. An increase in…