Transferable Skills Training
A doctorate involves much more than the scientific work on your dissertation itself - from presenting at conferences, to managing research projects, to navigating complex team structures and different communication styles: various challenges await first stage researchers. In today's dynamic work environment, transferable skills that you can apply in diverse fields are therefore becoming increasingly relevant.
TUM Graduate School (TUM-GS) offers a wide range of courses in six different areas to expand and sharpen your competency profile. The courses are designed as complementary qualification during your doctorate at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and offer valuable orientation for your next career steps.
Starting a doctorate is also a departure into an unknown future: It is not only the beginning of an exciting new phase of life characterised by many challenges, but also a struggle for untapped knowledge. It is precisely the often tedious process of carving out unexplored knowledge and sharpening the scientific thinking and experimentation process that promotes the development of skills that can be of central importance for the further course of one's life and career. The term ‚future skills‘ refers to precisely this equipment for a complex, rapidly changing and in many respects genuinely uncertain future.
With a doctorate, you therefore not only acquire subject-specific knowledge and become an expert in a specific field. Rather, you learn to understand how complex knowledge comes about in the first place and under what conditions an understanding of the world is produced. This ability, namely to think systemically and to tolerate ambiguities, are important elements of a 'future skillset'. In a rapidly changing environment, which has been shaped by the extremely fast development of generative AI and large language models (LLM) over the past year in particular, it is not just a matter of acquiring specific technological skills. As important as these are on their own, 'future skills' must start at another point: with learning literacy and self-efficacy, which ensures that the next technological development can also be mastered - and the next one after that as well.
With our transferable skills training, we would like to encourage you to discover, rethink and further develop your skills under the focus topic 'Future Skills'. Courses specifically geared towards these skills, such as "Kompetenzen für eine Welt im Wandel", support you in this endeavour as does the development of leadership skills in the workshop "Systemisches Toolkit für angehende Führungskräfte" or the strengthening of your resilience and self-determination in our courses on "Emotional Intelligence" or "Self-confidence and assertiveness". In addition, panel discussions and impulse talks specifically on the topic of 'Future Skills' are planned throughout the academic year.
