A review of literature on challenges and obstacles to implementation of generic skills

Abstract

As a result of continuous curriculum transformation (Chan & Luk, 2013) in today’s knowledge-based society, government and employers have expressed raising demand for graduates’ quality, not only in terms of discipline knowledge but also generic skills (Chan, 2012a). This global movement of generic skills involves many unresolved issues that need to be thoroughly investigated. Thus, in this paper, we provide a critical review of literature on challenges in generic-skills development as identified over the past 20 years. Firstly, there is disagreement on the definition of generic skills. A variety of terms have been used interchangeably to express the notion of generic skills (Barrie, 2005), yet there has not been an open discussion of how such notion can be more ...