6 - Preparing for professional practice

Summary

A graduate will have ‘qualities and transferable skills necessary for employment requiring: the exercise of initiative and personal responsibility; decision-making in complex and unpredictable contexts; and the learning ability needed to undertake appropriate further training of a professional or equivalent nature.’

(QAA, 2001: Annex 1)

The framework for higher education qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland states that university students must develop skills that are of value to employers, including the ability to act on their own initiative and make decisions. These requirements are relevant to all disciplines, and are particularly important in disciplines where the degree qualification is recognised by a professional body. This chapter will look at assignments that help students develop decision-making skills, and start to write more like professionals in their chosen fields. These assignments mostly belong in the Problem Question, Proposal, Design Specification and Case Study genre families. Following Spafford et al. (2006) we will refer to them as ‘apprenticeship genres’.

The Requirements of Professional Bodies

Many British university programmes are eligible for accreditation by what is known as a Professional, Statutory and Regulatory Body (PSRB). In some disciplines, such as Medicine, accreditation is essential, whereas in others, such as the Engineering disciplines, it can confer partial exemption from professional qualifications. Eligible departments generally regard accreditation as a worthwhile activity because it provides a means of quality assurance and enhances the employability of their graduates, for example by improving their prospects of practising their profession overseas.

Because of the benefits of accreditation, many university departments develop their programmes and curricula in close collaboration with PSRB members, although there may be some concern amongst lecturers about the need to balance the PSRB focus on practical professional skills against the academic requirements of a university education (LTS, 2007). PSRBs issue guidelines regarding course content, with an emphasis on the student’s future working life outside the university. The academic accreditation guidelines developed by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (2009), for example, emphasise the need to ‘establish the relevance of engineering to real world problems’, and the Chartered Institute for IT, or BCS (2007), requires that their accredited programmes should be ‘influenced by research, industry and market requirements’.