ADVErtOrIAL
Lockdown skills Challenging students’ misconceptions
As we enter the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, school doors across the UK are once again closed to the majority of students. We’re starting to gain a better understanding of the impact this is having on how able students feel to develop the skills they’ll need for the future.
Why the focus on skills? As we all know, skills are essential to help young people develop into well-rounded adults who will stand out in what’s likely to be a highly competitive job market. What’s more, making sure that employers are able to hire people with the necessary skills will be vital to help successfully revive the post-pandemic economy.
Difficulty developing skills
At Unifrog, we’re in a privileged position to explore this. We analysed aggregated data from 700,000 active UK students on the platform and 6,253 student survey responses to find out more about how the pandemic has impacted skills development.
Unfortunately, the majority of students we surveyed believe the pandemic has made it more difficult to develop skills that might be useful for their future career. And as they get older, the more likely students are to report difficulty developing these skills. 70% of those in Year 13 report finding it more difficult to develop useful skills, compared to 46% of Year 10 students.
Which skills have been most impacted? Analysis of the Unifrog Competencies tool gives us an insight into students’ skills development during the pandemic. Students use the Competencies tool to reflect on and record the key skills that employers and universities look for, ready to use in strong applications. The two competencies which saw the greatest decline in logging during the pandemic were teamwork and leadership. Compared to the year before, there was an 82% drop in the number of teamwork competencies logged, and a 79% fall for leadership.
How students’ competencies logging behaviour changed during the pandemic, compared to 2019
Arguably these are two of the skills traditionally most reliant on in-person interaction and as a result, students perceive them to be difficult to demonstrate during lockdown.