Giving undergraduates managerial experience

For over a decade, a number of employers have been sounding warnings to the higher education sector that a “skills gap” was emerging at the employer/graduate interface. Some graduate recruiters no longer perceived academic competence alone to be sufficient and began calling for higher education to produce graduates with highly developed and recognisable transferable skills. Increasingly the graduates of the late 1990s are being asked to display far more than subject‐specific knowledge and are asked to prove that this skills development activity has occurred, usually by demonstrating that they have taken additional responsibility for something or someone during their higher education experience. This work examines what higher education can do to facilitate the development of transferable, and especially managerial, skills amongst the undergraduate population using extra‐curricula schemes.