Future Skills für Studierende

Future skills – Tools for studying smarter

Learning the skills you need to achieve your goals as a student will also help you succeed when you transition to the world of work. Succeeding in your studies means identifying goals as well as initiating, executing and reflecting on learning and study processes. This is especially true of courses with increased levels of self-regulated learning or when you are preparing for exams. To succeed, you'll need to acquire some new skills and habits. But these can all be learned – and we want to show you how.

According to Ehlers, the skills you need to acquire are those competencies that will allow you to 'act (successfully) in a self-organized manner in highly emergent contexts of action' (Ehlers, 2020, p. 111; in German). Researchers in this field refer to these competencies as 'future skills' and give them the same weight and importance as specialist subject-specific knowledge.

The fundamental questions you need to ask and answer are: What are my short-term, medium-term and long-term goals? What steps do I need to take to achieve them? To help you identify and progress towards your goals, we have drawn up a number of useful strategies that we're presenting on this website. Useful strategies include those that

• help you to learn and understand content (cognitive strategies),
• help you to set goals and to regulate your own learning and study processes (metacognitive strategies) and
• those that are helpful when you lose focus or lose your drive to continue working on a problem or assignment (motivational strategies).

Try out our how-to guides and discuss the ideas they contain with your fellow students. Each how-to guide introduces a particular strategy and gives you tips and advice on how you can use them to boost your learning productivity and improve your study habits.

Metacognitive strategies

Metacognitive strategies help you to formulate your (learning) objectives and to plan, monitor and optimize learning and study processes with a view to achieving these goals (cf. Wild & Schiefele, 1994).

• How-to-Learn-SMART (EN)
• How-to-Manage-My-Goals (EN)
• How-to-Manage-Myself (EN)
• How-to-React  (EN)
• How-to-Know-My-Goal-Orientation (EN)
• How-to-Self-Assessment (EN)

Digital literacy

• How-to-Protect-My-Privacy (EN)
• How-to-Cybersecurity (EN)
• How-to-ChatGPT (EN)
• How-to-Prompt-in-ChatGPT (EN)
• How-to-Use-ChatGPT-Responsibly (EN)
• How-to-Microsoft-365 (EN)
• How-to-Microsoft-OneNote (EN)
• How-to-Microsoft-Teams (EN)
• How-to-Microsoft-Team-Meetings (EN)

Additional reading

U.-D. Ehlers, Future Skills, Zukunft der Hochschulbildung – Future Higher Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-29297-3_7

Other programmes hosted at Saarland University

The Core Skills programme managed by Saarland University's Teaching and Learning Centre (ZeLL)

The Teaching Assistant and Learning programme managed by Saarland University's Teaching and Learning Centre (ZeLL)