This wiki hosts the results of research conducted by Dr Jenny Willis at the University of Surrey

into the way the university promotes professional capability amongst its students

Professional capability, it’s what the University of Surrey first built its reputation on.  It was at the centre of a successful bid to become a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning which led to the establishment of the Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Excellence (SCEPTrE).  But what is professional capability?  How does the university continue to maintain its lead in employability league tables when only some 50% of its students undertake a professional training year?

These are the questions that underpin this ambitious study of the university’s undergraduate programmes.  Aimed at leaving a legacy which would enable departments to build on their expertise and to offer the wider audience insight into one institution’s approach to professional development, the research was commissioned by SCEPTrE in 2009.  It examines undergraduate programmes in every subject, by Faculty.  It has been a real tour de force, illustrating the reality of conducting action research over two years at a time of intense local and international constraint.

Eventually, matrices were developed in order to determine how departments use the flexibility built into assessment regulations.  These reveal the respective modes of assessment used and the credit weighting accorded to each.  The professional capabilities sought by departments are identified through their assessment criteria for professional training.  These are collated and analysed against the university’s Graduate Skills Statement and PDP themes. 

The research report has been structured in recognition of readers’ different interests, providing a series of PDFs which can be dipped into according to choice:

The cover pages include an index to the complete report and the executive summary.

Section I sets the theoretical and conceptual background.

Section II.1 explains the faculty and departmental structure and the formulation of the analytical tools.

Section II.2 collates the data by faculty and individually by department, and calculates mean scores at university level, to reveal the respective modes of assessment and dimensions of professional capability formally assessed.

Sections III – VI comprise individual chapters for each department, presented alphabetically by faculty and within each faculty by department.

Section VII returns to the comprehensive data and examines them from different perspectives, leading to 6 suggestions for taking forward the findings of this research

SEMINAR

What are the outcomes of the professional training experience?

Dr Jenny Willis

‘Can we really assess professionalism?’ ‘What is professionalism?’ ‘Defining professionalism.’‘Professional intelligence.’ ‘Assessing WIL’. ‘Conceptualisng professional capability.’ ’In search of professionalism.’  ‘How we develop professional capability through the undergraduate curriculum. ‘Learning to become a creative professional.’

Looking back on these examples of articles and presentations I have written over the last few years, there is an indisputable change in tone: where once hesitant and tentative, a more confident voice rings through.  We have, indeed, come a long way since my 2004 pre-USEM conceptualisation of the outcomes of Surrey’s renowned professional training scheme.  Building on York and Knight’s model, subsequent research for SCEPTrE confirmed Eraut’s learning trajectories and harnessed them to produce templates for monitoring professional development and informing curriculum design.  This was followed by the most challenging project of all: a curriculum-wide examination of professional competence at the University of Surrey, its meaning, how institutional policies are implemented by departments to achieve it, how and which professional capabilities are assessed.  This seminar will present key findings from the research which encourage us to believe that a change of paradigm is happening, and that relativism is replacing realism in the practice of evaluating and assessing students’ professional achievements.