Revisiting the Personal Transferable Skills Debate - an eLearning Pedagogical Perspective

Personal Transferable Skills (PTS) are essential work skills which are not specific to any subject or profession, and which, though learned in one context may be successfully transferred to and applied in many other contexts. They are skills that enable people to acquire, structure, interpret and put to efficient use, their subject knowledge. There is a growing concern among educational providers and employers’ organisations on the lack of PTS of university graduates. This phenomenon has been amplified by the need of university graduates of the twenty-first century to possess skills and knowledge that can be effectively used in new domains and in different situations since there is also an increasing tendency for graduates to take jobs outside their academic field of study. There have been several attempts to promote PTS by university institutions in the traditional classroom settings where three broad approaches for developing PTS within the curriculum have been experimented with. To date, progress so far has been patchy. The paper is in two theoretical parts. The first part seeks to advance the theoretical framework of REALs as the better approach to teaching and learning in our universities. The second part of the paper argues that theoretically, communication theory (which draws on contemporary rhetorical theory) and social informatics theory provide important perspective for the application of eLearning based on REALs in the development of PTS for university graduates. The paper would contribute significantly to theoretical underpinnings of eLearning based on REALs for the development of PTS of university graduates.