AN ANALYSIS ON RESEARCH AND TRANSFERABLE SKILLS DEVELOPMENT APPROACHES IN DOCTORAL PROGRAMMES FRAMEWORKS IN EUROPE

The emergence of new developmental perspectives in the framework of evolving knowledge societies and economies in different countries and the necessity of human resources needed to accomplish such goals, the redefinition of graduate programs policies is vital in the higher education systems. Accordingly, the doctoral programs must meet the demands of the labor market in different sectors of society. Perhaps, the importance of doctoral graduate's skills development in response to labor market needs may be outlined as one of the most important attributes of the new graduate research programs. In the graduate programs of the developed countries higher education institutes, especially the European universities, the experiences earned by students through research and transferable skills training have an outstanding impact on their career prospects. This paper introduces the generic and transferable skills, and presents an overview of the different types of research skills that have a special role in graduate programs. Then the transferable skills are discussed and examples of such skills are explained. Later on, the issue of skills training is considered and different training methods used in this field have been presented. In the next section, the paper outlines several experiences of skills training in doctoral engineering programs. Finally, the paper briefly looks at the weakness of the transferable skills training in doctoral programs in Iran and the need to address this issue, especially in research-based Ph.D programs that their implementation has recently begun in Iran.