Towards Integrated Graduate Skills for UK Computing Science Students

In preparing computing science students for industry, degree content often focuses on technical skills such as programming. Such skills are essential for a successful post-study career in industry and is popular with students. However, industry notes that students are often limited in what can be referred to as graduate attributes or transferable skills. Such skills include effective teamwork, communication, and critical thinking amongst others. Similar gaps have also been demonstrated for computing science students more specifically, resulting in industry developing their own training programmes for graduates. To address this issue, graduate attributes could be incorporated more readily into computing curricula. Within the UK this is discussed in accreditation requirements as well as higher education frameworks. However, research which aims to explore how to achieve this is still comparatively limited. Building on existing work in this area, this paper presents a thematic analysis of graduate attributes at Russell Group Universities in the UK to identify the most common attribute themes, and uses the most frequent themes to begin to consider how these could be more readily embedded in CS curricula.