Cultivating the skills for success in Business and Law

When students embark on their higher education journey, they start at various points in their learning. Some possess relevant skills that would help them thrive in their courses while others don’t due to socioeconomic disadvantage and other factors. The development of the Business and Law Skills Toolkit stems from an endeavour to level the playing field and support all students enrolled in Business and Law courses to thrive in their studies and beyond. 

As part of the project to develop the toolkit, Wendy Webber, Director of Student Experience in the Faculty of Business and Law, and Vivek Venkiteswaran, Digital Coordinator from the Business and Law pod, worked with various unit chairs, course directors and the SEBE pod to identify the skills that Business and Law students need to succeed at various levels including the introductory, intermediate and the professional levels. The skills and tools identified range from disciplinary skills such as business reporting to non-disciplinary skills such as Microsoft Office skills, including the use of Excel and Microsoft Teams.  

The team has worked on curating resources that students can use to supplement or bolster their learning of these tools and develop their business and law skills. A lot of resources were already available, however, there were no Deakin resources on Microsoft Excel so the team is currently creating a resource hosted on CloudDeakin to support students in learning how to us this tool. The resource is organised by discipline, units and level, so students have different access points. They will also have permanent access to this resource so they can work at their pace, ahead of time or go back for a refresher when the need arises. 

Want to know more? 

To learn more, listen to the Tales of Teaching Online podcast episode, Developing the Business and Law Skills toolkit with Dr Isma Seetal and Wendy Webber.