Winning Students Are Employable Students

Executive Summary Skills and employability have a direct impact on life opportunities. Understanding how skills are learned, developed, applied, maintained and adapted over time can facilitate improving the employability of individuals. Sports scholars are a unique population for investigation as they need to maintain a wide range of skills and acquire new ones in order to perform in two domains (education and sport). The ability to refine a previous skill, or learn new skills that may be required to be effective in a new domain or wider activity, is an important issue for society as a prosperous economy depends on the development of new skills. The aim of this project was to assess the impact of the Winning Students sports scholarship programme on the development of key transferable skills and graduate attributes and employability. First, we reviewed the evidence-base of sport and education in the development of transferable skills desired by employers. Second, we reported employment data from graduate Winning Students and contrasted results with the wider sector of graduates. Third, through focus groups, we identified key transferable skills learned by Winning Students and explored how they were developed. Finally, through an experiment, we tested the impact of Winning Students (sporting excellence) to graduate employability. The literature review suggested that sport can significantly contribute to employers' perceptions of candidate's employability. In other words, if student-athletes are able to demonstrate the skills they have learned, developed, applied, maintained and adapted through sport and how these skills transfer to the workplace, they could be more likely to be perceived as highly employable. The literature also revealed how student-athletes could be an important population to help better understand an emerging 'new era' related to employability based on potential (i.e., the ability to adapt and grow into increasingly complex roles and environments). Potential is being seen an important predictor of success because the employment market is changing so rapidly and it is nearly impossible to predict the competencies needed to succeed in even a few years. Research shows how people with the highest potential have: a strong motivation to excel in the pursuit of challenging goals; the humility to put the group ahead of individual needs; the ability to be pushed out of their comfort zone with stretch development; a strong engagement with their work and the people around them; and, the determination to overcome setbacks and obstacles. The literature review indicates that student-athletes …