The importance of skills
At University, students gain knowledge and understanding of their subject area, but they also develop and gain more general transferable skills, often called graduate skills. To an employer, it's the last of these three, graduate skills, that is the more important.
Why should this be? Partly it's because:
- Much of the knowledge and understanding can be irrelevant to the particular post the employer is offering.
- Information can quickly go out of date.
What an employer wants, is people who know how to learn, can adapt to new situations, communicate and work successfully within a team i.e. skills.