MySkills: A new platform helping recruiters to make better-informed decisions in less time
While the term ‘time poverty’, first coined by economist Clair Vickery in 1977, is not a new one, its pervasiveness in a world defined by hyper-novelty, ubiquitous digital connectivity, and the normalisation of ‘polytasking’ – multi-tasking’s more overzealous cousin! – is unprecedented. Arguably, this is particularly true for those HR professionals overseeing graduate recruitment processes. Indeed, data from the Institute of Students Employers in the U.K. revealed that each available graduate job received on average 140 applications in 2024, a sharp increase on previous years.
Undoubtedly, the prospect of wading through large numbers of applications in an efficient but effective manner in order to shortlist candidates for interviews can be a daunting one. While software programmes and more recent artificial intelligence (A.I.) tools can aid with this, the blunt standardisation which often characterises these approaches does not always result in optimal outcomes. This can leave the organisation dissatisfied with the performance of a new hire and ultimately see the recruitment process re-commence far too soon, costing both additional time and money.
With regard to graduate recruitment in particular, the move towards a ‘skills first’ recruitment model, which ascribes increasing weight to the actual skills a candidate has, rather than their specific qualification, means that traditional university transcripts, listing an individual’s subjects, grades and degree award, but saying little about their skills, are not necessarily the ideal mechanism to help inform the recruitment process. While the attainment of a degree does serve a useful ‘signalling’ function, the static nature of a transcript needs to be re-imagined or supplemented.
For this reason, Dublin City University (DCU) has designed a unique and highly innovative skills ecosystem with the aim of enabling students to evidence their competence in specific skills and generate a personalised skills report which they can share with potential employers. This, in turn, can help employers make better informed, evidence-based hiring decisions that can save time, energy and money. This ecosystem focuses specifically on the development and evidencing of students’ and graduates’ transversal skills - skills that do not belong to any specific role, discipline, department or sector, but rather can be applied across all domains. These may be cognitive, interpersonal, technical, or human-centric in nature, and include skills such as critical thinking, creative thinking, project management, digital literacy, communicative competence, leadership, ethical decision-making, personal agility, A.I. literacy, and teamwork, to name just a few. These skills are sometimes referred to as ‘transferable skills’, ‘human skills', 'meta skills', 'power skills', '21st century skills’, or ‘core skills’, and, while each of these labels is justifiable through a certain lens, it is unfortunate that the most commonly used label is also the most inappropriate and inaccurate one, namely ‘soft skills’. The use of this term, first proposed by the U.S. Military post-WWII, and later rejected by the very same organisation in the 1970s, remains commonplace across most sectors over 50 years later, and serves only to create a false hierarchy and propagate negative associations that undermine the value of the very skills we ought to be prioritising in modern society. Indeed, the advent of A.I. raises existential questions about the uniqueness that humans can bring to any organisation and it is precisely through cultivating and leveraging transversal skills – skills that are fundamentally human – that this uniqueness can be realised. Transversal skills are, in essence, humanity’s USP.
The DCU ecosystem, architected and implemented over a four-year period, brings an unprecedented level of rigour, consistency and transparency to the integration of transversal skills within higher education. Each skill has been defined and operationalised through a collaborative process involving both internal and external experts, resulting in a competence framework that is applicable across the entire university, regardless of discipline. Importantly, each skill is broken down into its constituent indicators, referred to as discipline agnostic competence statements (DACS), which then become formal learning outcomes within programme modules. This means that students develop and are assessed on specific DACS and, by extension, their transversal skills within the programme of study in an authentic and consistent manner. Crucially, each DACS is assessed using a universal rubric to optimise for quality and comparability across programmes. In this sense, transversal skills are not seen as orbiting around the periphery of a programme but rather are woven into its fabric from beginning to end. The inclusion of one or more DACS in any module means that it will be formally assessed within the module, with the result of the assessment feeding directly into DCU’s new transversal skills platform, MySkills.
The MySkills platform, developed in collaboration with Symplicity, a major international educational software solutions provider, not only captures and organises the results of the formal assessment of students’ transversal skills within their programme, but also allows students to self-report on their level of competence in these skills using the same universal rubrics as academics. This offers a more holistic view of an individual’s transversal skills, while clearly differentiating between ratings that are DCU-verified and self-reported. Students can then create a fully personalised and customisable transversal skills report that can be shared with potential employers who, faced with large numbers of applications, want a reliable, rigorous, and easy to understand skills report that can enhance their decision making while also saving time. This is the key value of the MySkill platform.
When generating a skills report, the learner selects the specific skills they wish to evidence and can choose to show their DCU-verified ratings, their self-reported ratings, or both. In all cases, the individual’s specific level of competence in a given skill is shown, as well as the definition of the skill, so that the employer has a clear understanding of what is meant by each skill and where a candidate is located on the competence framework. In addition to this, should they wish to, the learner can even show their level of competence in each of the indicators that make up any given skill, offering employers a unique level of granularity, insight and detail into a candidate’s skillset.
The MySkills platform is unique in Ireland and internationally and has been shortlisted for the prestigious Times Higher Education Awards 2025. It has been designed to provide students with the opportunity to capture and communicate their transversal skills in an accessible and easy to understand way, but also to address the growing frustration among employers that universities, heretofore, have not provided sufficient information about skills that students or graduates have. In the coming months and beyond, as the framework is scaled across the university, more and more DCU students and graduates will use MySkills to generate personalised reports that showcase their transversal skills when applying for jobs. So, when an HR professional working in graduate recruitment receives a MySkills report from a DCU candidate, they will know it is backed up by a rigorous skills ecosystem and competence framework that treats transversal skills with the gravitas they deserve, while also highlighting a commitment to quality, innovation and impact that lies at the heart of DCU.
For more information on DCU’s Transversal Skills strategy and the MySkills platform, please visit www.dcu.ie/ovpaa/transversal-skills
