At Queen Mary University of London we have recently completed a project to review and update our graduate attributes. The revised attributes set out an up-to-date vision of the knowledge, skills and behaviours that Queen Mary students will develop as a result of their learning and experiences at university.
Students as partners
Involving students in this process was important as working in partnership with students and co-creation is an institutional priority for Queen Mary. We integrated co-creation into our overall approach and established four key factors which should inform our university attributes; disciplinary skills, employer requirements, Queen Mary’s values and student views. Students were also core members of the team undertaking this work, and so were not simply consulted for their opinions, but co-designers of the entire process.
Although it is not an approach that is commonly used, our student co-creators, and indeed the whole cross-disciplinary and cross-functional project team, felt that student views of attributes should form a core input to the process. We were not just interested in what academics said were the key graduate attributes embedded within their disciplines and programmes, but also wanted to find out which attributes students thought they were developing. Similarly, we wanted to complement employer views in terms of the top skills and attributes they seek in graduates by asking students what they think would be the most important graduate attributes for them, in terms of both their future employability and their future lives.
