Professor David Coates
School of Life Sciences
University of Dundee, UK

Date: Thursday, 11-April-2019
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Venue: Seminar Room 2, G/F, Laboratory Block, Faculty of Medicine Building
21 Sassoon Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

Summary:
For many years, there has been a push to develop graduates for their future employment, not just to develop their knowledge and love of a subject – starting with ‘Generic Skills’, and moving through various guises to ‘Employability’, Higher Education has been pushed to give their graduates the right skills for the labour market, and funding agencies have looked for ways to encourage those developments without always having national standards to enforce. Unlike much of the rest of the world, the UK lacks these formal national standards, depending as it does on either a market driven approach; or a financial-incentive approach, to deliver national needs in each of the four nations. Unlike the regulated professions, where standards and approaches are legally enforced through independent accreditation, subjects within the biological sciences have been very loosely controlled. The effect of that lack of control has impacted on graduate skills and abilities in the wider world of work, and as a result, many governing agencies have looked for mechanisms to make sure that the ‘blue skys’ degree subjects, like the life sciences, also equip students for the more down-to-earth workplace world they will be joining.

ALL ARE WELCOME