Employers are looking for graduates who can quickly fit in to their organisation and produce added value for their company. The graduate who is flexible and can adapt easily is most likely to achieve success both for the company and for themselves. Transferable Skills (ie. those skills which can be applied in a variety of different contexts) are highly valued by employers. A recent survey of employers attitudes: "Graduates Work: Organisational Change and Students' Attributes" by Lee Harvey et al. is available in the Careers Corner. The most important transferable skills identified in that survey are listed below. Students should take the chance to develop these skills at every opportunity in their degree course. Skills training is explicitly promoted in the Physics 3 Careers Revolution Course and in 4th year Project Work.
The following skills, attributes, abilities and competences are deliberately not ranked or graded, but are placed in alphabetical order, as their importance varies from employer to employer:
These are of equal or greater importance to the traditional degree based competences such as mathematical ability or physics knowledge.