The Business Skills Handbook
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
The Business Skills Handbook
What are the Key Skills of University
Life and the Workplace?
Week 4
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Reading
Recommended text:
The Business Skills Handbook
Horn, R.
London: CIPD.
1st edition, 2009
ISBN: 1843982188
Chapter 4: What are the Key Skills of University Life
and the Workplace? (page 79)
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Lecture Outline

exploring academic skills
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Learning Objectives



understand the key academic skills
be able to recognise academic skills in the writing of
others
be able to apply academic skills to your own writing
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Academic Skills

We could define academic skills as ‘the skills that are
assessed in university assessments’. The following
are the key academic skills that will be tested in your
assignments and examinations. The skills of critique,
analysis and evaluation are often called the higherlevel skills and these are tested more in years 2 and
3 of your degrees.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Knowledge

There is no simple and agreed meaning to the word
‘knowledge’. Philosophy has debated the meaning for
centuries. A working definition for the purposes of an
assignment or examination will probably focus on the
following aspects:
– the state of knowing something
– familiarity, awareness, or understanding gained through
experience or study
– specific information about something
– acquaintance with facts relating to a topic.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Knowledge [2]

The probable types of knowledge that you will need
to display are:
–
–
–
–
–
–
facts
theory, concepts, models, typologies
research data
approaches to problem-solving
approaches to data-handling and representation
benchmark and best practice approaches to standard
institutional problems.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Understanding

Understanding might be considered to be the ability
to think and act flexibly with what one knows. Clearly,
this will require ‘knowing’ something, which is where
the previous section comes in useful, but how can we
demonstrate understanding?
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Understanding [2]

Using our definition above – ‘the ability to think and
act flexibly with what one knows’ – would lead us to
at least the following three ways of demonstrating
understanding:
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Understanding [3]

Offering explanations – people display
understanding of things by offering explanations. This
involves highlighting critical features of a theory or
idea, such as explaining someone’s enthusiasm for
doing a task by offering the explanation of his or her
desire for the reward that is offered by completing the
task. This displays a rudimentary understanding of
expectancy theory.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Understanding [4]

Displaying relational knowledge – people express
understanding in explanations constructed of
relational knowledge. This is a complex web of cause
and effect explanation, whereas sparse explanation
only involving one simple rule would suggest a
sketchy understanding of an idea or theory.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Understanding [5]

Displaying a revisable and extensible explanation
– people demonstrate understanding by revising and
extending their explanations. Thus, explanations
need to be both highly extensible and revisable in
fundamental ways. If it were not we would see
limitations to the level of understanding.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Analysis

What is analysis and how can I demonstrate the skill
of analysis in my university work?
– First, it is almost impossible to demonstrate analysis without
having an understanding of the relevant knowledge of the
area you are analysing, so this section is closely connected
to sections related to knowledge and understanding.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Analysis [2]

Analysis on its own will not guarantee that your
assignments and examinations will be awarded good
grades. Analysis needs to be connected to critique to
create a skill and approach called critical analysis.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Analysis [3]

Definitions of analysis tend to focus on these types of
approach:
– the study of the constituent parts and the interrelationship of
the parts
– the breaking down and separation of the whole into
constituent parts
– simplifying the whole into parts to display the logical
structure
– an explanation of a process and the parts of that process.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Critique

Critique is the term given to the process of estimating
the quality of something. Strictly defined, it is the
critical examination of something. The review of the
sources and evidence you use in your assignments
and examinations will first involve critique, the close
and critical examination of something, and then an
evaluative judgement of the worth will be made.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Critique [2]

Critique is a very important aspect of academic
writing as your own claims and argument will be built
on the sources that you use. The aim in using critique
is to select the strong elements of sources and
discard the weak elements.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Critique [3]

What is the process of critique when used for
theory or journal sources?
– First, you will need to paraphrase the ideas contained in the
work. Paraphrasing is a type of summary that extracts and
presents the key elements of the writing. What is the key
idea or focus of the writing? What component elements does
the writing contain. Strictly, this is termed critical analysis.
– Next, set out the strengths and weaknesses of the writing –
for this section use other writers’ scholarly thoughts. These
can be found in textbooks and in journal articles. Most
writing that contains theory, research or ideas will be making
a claim or a series of claims. How well are those claims
supported by evidence?
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Checklist for Critique



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
Paraphrase the theory, article or research.
Draw out the main claim or claims.
Consider the argument that builds towards the
claims.
Is a balanced or counter argument presented?
Review the evidence for each of the claims.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Checklist for Critique [2]

Bring the thoughts of other scholarly work to bear on
the theory, article or research.
Report the findings of your critique.

There is a later chapter that looks at critical writing.

The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Synthesis and Creativity

Synthesis can be regarded as the skill of bringing
separate components together to form something
new. In assignments and examinations one of the
first and most frequently occurring syntheses is the
bringing together of theories to form explanations
about the subject of the assignment. Most ‘new’ ideas
and solutions in business and management occur by
combining existing ideas into new explanatory
frameworks or ways of working.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Synthesis and Creativity [2]

Synthesis is also commonly required in academic
work where the combination of well-used ideas and
approaches are brought together to offer new
solutions. Synthesis can also occur using new
combinations of tried and tested theory applied to
new organisational contexts.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Synthesis and Creativity [3]

Creativity is often linked with synthesis. Indeed, it
might be argued that synthesis is a type of creativity,
but for the purposes of assignments a working
definition might be:
– ‘the ability to bring into existence a new idea or insight’.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Evaluation


What is evaluation?
How can I display evaluation skills in my university
assessments?
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Evaluation [2]

Evaluation is the process of judging the worth of
something. We make judgements all the time, every
day. In the average day you will make judgements
about all sorts of things: breakfast, football matches,
handbags, lectures, people, articles, other people’s
work, your own work and lots more.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Evaluation [3]

In the majority of our everyday judgements we bring
considerable experience to bear on the judgements
we make. We have probably eaten hundreds of
sandwiches in our life and we have formed a view on
what makes a good sandwich. Judging the value of
academic theory, research or methods is not quite so
easy because we have much less experience of
these things.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Evaluation [4]

One way to judge these academic things would be to
compare them to a template or set of criteria. Mostly
in these academic judgements no such template or
set of criteria exists, so making evaluations will rely
on more creative approaches.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Evaluation [5]

One of the best approaches to evaluating theory and
method is to allow other scholars to make the
judgement. Using this method would require finding
journal or textbook writing that critiques theory or
method. There are normally some well-reported and
well-developed critiques of most management theory
and this can be used to evaluate theory and journal
sources in assignments.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Evaluation [6]

Academic theory can also be evaluated by how often
and how successfully the theory has been used to
explain research or to explain practical actions in
organisations. By this method we will judge the most
often used theory to be better than the less used
theory.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Evaluation [7]

One further approach to evaluation is judging how
well a theory can explain action; good theory tends to
have more explanatory power than weak theory. This
is often judged by the areas of action that cannot be
explained by the chosen theory.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Evaluation [8]

In assessments it is important to evaluate the
usefulness of the sources used to guide and support
your argument. All theories will have strengths and
weaknesses; these need to be explored and a final
evaluative judgement made about each element of
the theory.
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Evaluation [9]

Journal sources can be judged on a number of
factors relating to:
–
–
–
–
–
How objective has the author been?
What is the major claim of the article?
How persuasive has the argument been?
What evidence has been used to support the argument?
What is the rank of the journal in which the article is
published?
– Does the evidence presented support the major claim?
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Activity
Managing stress and Spencer &
Smith – case study
120 minutes’
prep
10 minutes’
feedback
Prepare answers to the five
case study tasks.
Feedback to the group –
‘the question you have
been allocated’
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
Next Week
• group and team theory
• effective team behaviours
• high-performance teams
• the politics of teams
• why teams fail
• project teams
• leading teams
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
The Business Skills Handbook
The End
The Business Skills Handbook
Roy Horn - Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development