5 What is the OU Employability Framework?
The Open University’s Employability Framework encapsulates the core employability skills and attributes needed to help individuals in their personal and career development, by enabling them to recognise, develop, and articulate these skills and attributes they have gained through both formal and informal learning. Take a moment to familiarise yourself the framework in the figure below.
The framework captures ten core employability skills and attributes across three domains:
- Core skills and competencies
- Personal attributes and behaviours
- External awareness
Over the next three sessions you will explore each domain and its associated skills and attributes in further detail, relating to them to your engagement in sport.
Understanding what each element of the framework means will prove important throughout this course. In the next activity you will explore these in more detail. Before moving onto the activity it is important to note that this OpenLearn course is tailored to Level 1 learning, i.e. an introduction to these concepts, therefore the definitions below are appropriate to this level. However, these are likely to differ depending on the context or level in which you work, and you may find that your ability within some of these skills are more sophisticated than outlined in the definitions.
Activity 8 Defining the skills
Match the element of the OU Employability Framework with the correct Level 1 definition.
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You might already be able to see how your experience in sport has helped to shape and develop some of these skills. Gaining further insight into the framework will help build a solid foundation of knowledge and, hopefully, develop a strategy to achieve your goals. You may find some of the activities in this course a little challenging, but they should also be rewarding. You could also take some of the discussion ‘offline’ and engage in conversations about your skill set with those close to you, both within sport and your career. For example, perhaps completing a skills self-audit with feedback from those you work closely with.