Transferable Skills

10 Credits, Spring Term

This module will provide you with an opportunity to develop transferable skills that will enhance personal and professional development and hence employability. You’ll gain experience of communicating about your research plans with different audiences (specialist and general public), and using different media (talks, posters, written text). The module will help you to write persuasively and introduce you to the world of scientific publishing, providing tips for getting your own work published. It will also provide training in the most advanced features of MS Word and PowerPoint and improve data handling skills in Excel, targeting those skills that our PhD and MSc students have told us they wished they had learned earlier.

Assessment for this module involves scientific writing for a general audience, writing a précis of a talk from the external seminar series and IT assignments on the VLE.

  • Seminar 1 – Giving effective presentations
  • Seminar 2 – Communicating research to a general audience
  • Seminar 3 – Preparing a poster
  • Seminar 4 – Excel tricks
  • Seminar 5 – Persuasive writing
  • Seminar 6 – Getting published
  • Seminars 7 and 8 – Student presentations of research plans