Employability skills

Stephen: But there's more direct things, the way that I've actually used my degree. It's given me confidence to take my degree and apply things I've learned elsewhere. Since I began my degree, I'm now doing something I would never have been able to do before; I now provide corporate training for the banking and capital market sectors.

I've exploited an opening up, you know, I saw a gap and I went for it and I've since worked overseas with some very august institutions providing a soft skill services like communication, team building.

Now some of them pull upon skills I gained in the arts but a lot of them need skills that directly I gained through my through my science degree. The course, one particular course I did gave me some very practical pointers to where I could get material to construct my workshops. But to do these forms of corporate training you have to devise your own curriculum in a sense. This is something I would never ever have had the ability to do before, before my degree. To have, and the key thing here is confidence, not only do you learn skills of organisation, so you can build a two day course in communication skills.

I was - I've been a performer all my life so I could get up on my feet and there's certain things I could do and public-speak the way maybe other people couldn't do, but that's only a tiny part of the journey. The way to actually form those structures, deliver to very intelligent people in a way that that is of use to them, was a skill way apart from the things I'd covered before. And my degree the reflective parts of my degree, the way the degree helped me to structure information was absolutely crucial. And so I didn't use my technological computing degree, well certainly not in all senses in my training services, in some small way I do. But mostly I used the secondary things that my degree taught me, which is the interface with human beings and complex systems and information.

And now my corporate training involves getting across complex information to intelligent but not necessarily fully informed people, which is part of what my degree has taught me, and so therefore, you see a way in which, and I was certainly a - it was a revelation to me, you see a way in which your degree has benefits you don't realise from the start, but then of course they are pretty directly related to the things that you've learned.