12 Core Skills
Warwick's 12 core employability skills
The Warwick Award is based around 12 core employability skills that employers tell us are crucial for the next step in your journey.
If you’re able to show how you’ve developed as many of these skills as possible during your time at Warwick – with specific examples of where you’ve done so, that you’ll be able to use when applying for jobs – you’ll be setting yourself up for a fantastic start to life after graduation.
On this page, we’ve pulled together a little more information about each of the 12 core skills that sit at the heart of the Warwick Award. We’ve included our definitions of each core skill, as well as related subskills and examples of where you might develop them during your time as a student.
To start developing these skills and capturing examples that you can use to help improve your employability, register for the Warwick Award! From there, you can complete our 12 Core Skills Experience profile, and find a range of opportunities across campus to develop your skills further. For the Award Pilot during the summer term of 2022, these will be listed on our website and available to sign up to via MyAdvantage.
More information
Critical thinking is the ability to analyse facts, data, information, and opinions to form an evaluation or judgment.
Related subskills include: interpreting, analysing, evaluating.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: writing an essay, conducting a literature review, doing your own independent reading to better understand a news story.
Information literacy is the ability to understand the nature and value of information, search and select information, manage lots of different bits of information effectively, and create and produce information so that it is robust and adds value to different discourses.
Related subskills include: searching for information, managing information , using and creating information.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: using databases, conducting literature reviews, communicating research findings to acknowledge limitations of the research.
Digital literacy is the ability to live, learn, and work in a society where communication and access to information is increasingly through digital technologies like internet platforms, social media, and mobile devices.
Related subskills include: IT skills, social media management, personal branding.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: using common Office software such as Excel and Word, managing a club/society social media feed, building an effective LinkedIn profile.
Sustainability is the awareness that the human past and present will profoundly affect our entangled environmental and social futures.
Related subskills include: social engagement, community citizenship, values thinking.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: recycling wherever possible, voting in your local elections and considering local issues of environmental and social sustainability when choosing who to support, researching an organisation’s values and seeing if they match up with the actions of the organisation when applying for a job.
Communication is the ability to convey or share ideas and feelings effectively, by speaking, writing, or using some other medium.
Related subskills include: public speaking, creative writing, active listening.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: giving a presentation, writing an essay, volunteering with Nightline.
Intercultural awareness is the ability to work productively with people from different cultural backgrounds.
Related subskills include: intercultural understanding, intercultural communication, intercultural sensitivity.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: learning a language, working in multicultural teams, sharing experiences with people from different cultural backgrounds, e.g. meals, sports events, seminars.
Teamwork is the ability to work in a team respectfully, productively, and cooperatively?
Related subskills include: collaboration, leadership, managing team processes.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: completing a group project, setting meeting agendas, being part of a sports team, and managing team deadlines.
Organisational awareness is the ability to understand organisational structures, operations, culture and systems, and adapt your behaviour and attitudes accordingly.
Related subskills include: commercial awareness, corporate social responsibility, government awareness.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: performing a SWOT analysis, researching an organisation and finding out its values, priorities and culture prior to a job application/interview.
Professionalism is the ability to be reliable, set your own high standards, and show you care about every aspect of your job by being industrious and organised, and holding yourself accountable for your thoughts, words, and actions.
Related subskills include: time management, attention to detail, personal impact.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: balancing competing deadlines to still complete all assessments and coursework on time, thoroughly proof-reading and editing coursework before it is submitted, representing your coursemates’ views to University staff.
Problem solving is the ability to define a problem or challenge, then find, design, and select a solution to it.
Related subskills include: problem creation, decision making, learning from failure.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: creating a brand new product, choosing modules that are relevant to your career aspirations, applying feedback on your essays to improve them next time around.
Ethical values are the ability to operate with high moral standards – namely being fair, respectful, compassionate, honest, and responsible.
Related subskills include: integrity, empathy, compassion.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: accurate and honest referencing in academic writing, not fabricating experiment results, mentoring a school student through an outreach/WP project.
Self-awareness is the ability to recognise your own personality, strengths, emotions; your ability to learn and develop.
Related subskills include: self-reflection, unlearning, self-directed learning.
Examples of where you might develop this skill during your time at Warwick: undergoing training to build skills you don’t feel confident in and identifying what else you need to do to practise them further, hiring a left-hand drive automatic car on holiday, when you’ve only ever driven with manual transmission in the UK, learning a foreign language via an app in your own time.