By Mark Hughes
On Wednesday 15 April 2026, Elevate hosted The University of Sheffield's annual Education Conference, centered around the theme: What does it mean to be a student at The University of Sheffield?.
In this second part of his blog, Mark Hughes of the Digital Learning Team reflects on his experiences at the Conference and at the panels he attended.
Career preparation and the early-career transition
In terms of how the students are prepared for their post-education lives, I was curious to hear both from current students and from recent graduates and understand how their experiences compared.
Where they did align was in their belief that the wider aspects of their time at the University is crucial to their learning. The development of transferable skills, participation in work and volunteering, research and community involvement are key to a good experience and what leads to readiness for the world of work after graduating.
Both the current students and recent graduates referred to the relevance of transferable or soft skills. The students spoke about developing communication skills, both interpersonal skills and digital communication, about collaborating with others through team activities and group assignments, of financial management in the need to budget living expenses, loans, part-time work and transitioning between bank accounts. The graduates additionally spoke to prioritisation skills and time management.
Another of these core skills they identified was resilience. In the current students panel discussion, one of the contributors talked about the importance of getting things wrong and learning from those mistakes. The quality of resilience was also highlighted in the employer’s panel discussion, acknowledged by Stephen Isherwood in his short talk as being about dealing with change, adaptability, and knowing how to cope with setbacks, especially from students who may be used to excelling academically. It was said there has been a clear shift away from academic achievement towards skills-based hiring. Helen Smith cited that even in a market as different as China, there is a clear movement towards skills-based hiring over solely academic achievement.
A skills gap?
Despite this focus of employers on applicants’ skills over academic achievement, another issue arising was the gap between expectations employers have and the skills those recently out of university possess.
One example of this raised by current students was the digital twin concept. Although the student was aware of it when at University, it wasn’t until in the workplace that the knowledge was applied.
The participants discussed their experiences using digital tools at university and the challenges of transitioning those skills to the professional world. One of the primary struggles mentioned was the gap between university education and workplace expectations regarding software skills. A student noted that there’s an expectation from employers that new hires should already know how to use specific software. They suggested that more exposure to these tools during their degree would have made the transition easier. Examples given of this were understanding the administrative side of how our VLE Blackboard works in the background, or having access to and authentic tasks in software platforms as used in the workplace.
Summary
What was clear from the day was that higher education must put students in good stead for their adult lives and professional careers. The school system is heavily reliant on exams and academic achievement. Although academic ability is naturally also a focus of higher education, the university experiences should prepare pupils for employment. Soft or transferable skills are a key part of this. Even in a world where technology is so prevalent and when faced with an uncertain labour market due to the exponential growth of GenAI and its impacts, collaboration, communication (interpersonal and digital), creativity, adapting to change, coping with failure and challenge and creativity are all essential human skills that graduates need to master life after formal education.
Mark Hughes is a Digital Learning Officer in the Digital Learning Team