Through a cluster randomised field trial, we evaluate the impact of an evidence-based, soft skills curriculum aimed at adolescents, referred to as Healthy Minds, that ran in 35 high schools in England over four years (2013/14 – 2017/18). We find supportive evidence that Healthy Minds positively augments the primary outcome of self-reported physical health in the treated adolescents. Treated pupils have global health attainment that is 0.235 standard deviations higher than children in the control group, resulting in a 10-percentile increase in their measured health status. We also find evidence of positive impacts on behaviour. There is no evidence of impacts on improved emotional wellbeing. We note significant gender differences in the effects found, strongly favouring boys. Overall, we provide strong evidence that a designed, taught life skills curriculum can improve related outcomes during the adolescent years, and that differential learning styles across visible aspects of diversity are worthy of consideration Healthy Minds.

Social science departments are regularly criticised for a perceived failure to provide their graduates with a range of transferable or employability skills. This is particularly acute in many politics departments that have the difficulty of not being seen as a vocational subject. This article provides a national audit of levels of transferable skills teaching in UK Politics departments, carried out in academic year 2013–2014. It will argue that there is much good work in these areas being carried out in the UK political studies community, providing students with a range of transferable skills they will find of great use as they move towards employment. It will however observe that the discipline is poor in highlighting this in the online descriptions of course content they provide to students (and their parents).

In this article, which expands on a lightning talk that was delivered at the BIALL Conference 2023, Lauren Cummings discusses how she developed and delivered a commercial awareness workshop to third-year students at Goldsmiths, University of London. She then reflects on how employability training relates to information skills and how developing these skills can help students from less advantaged backgrounds achieve their career goals. Lauren also discusses how employability work might fit into the role of the academic law librarian.

Increasing awareness of the productive potential of soft skills has sparked a discussion of their systematic and purposeful development. However, education systems pay only limited attention to this topic in most countries and remain focused on the development of hard skills. Is this approach rational or inadequate? This article provides new evidence on different aspects of the wage returns to soft skills (as an approximation of their productivity), and thereby contributes significantly to the discussion of the role of educational institutions in their development. It provides evidence that soft skills are as productive as hard skills. Moreover, it suggests that the productivity of hard skills stems from their combination with soft skills. These conclusions do not correspond to the fact that the value of education is intermediated mainly by hard skills, resulting in unequal development of soft and hard skills in schools. While concluding that education systems should pay more attention to soft skills development, the analysis recognises that this attention should be differentiated according to employers’ needs, owing to substantial differences in the value of soft skills across economic sectors. It is also noteworthy that while significant gender differences in returns to hard skills were identified, wage returns to soft skills appear gender neutral.

In the 1760s a newly qualified apprentice to the King's Geographer hit upon the idea of cutting up maps for children to assemble as a geographical teaching aid. Dissected maps remain popular to this day in their evolved form as jigsaw puzzles. This article, written by Alison Million during the Covid-19 lockdown when jigsaws have exploded in popularity, looks at their history and at research projects which have established their cognitive benefits or have used them as an inexpensive non-digital tool. By considering papers written on librarians’ thinking styles and on personality it seeks to establish with the help of a short survey whether parallels might exist between the cognitive skillsets of the jigsaw puzzler and those of the librarian.

This article represents a summary of the parallel session that Barry Vickery presented to delegates at the 2019 BIALL Annual Conference in Bournemouth. There, his presentation was entitled: ‘A glance at the past and a glimpse of the future – How to learn from the past to make better decisions in the future’. As BIALL was celebrating its 50th anniversary, Barry took the opportunity to look back at the last fifty years to highlight people and companies that had made good decisions and those that had made bad ones. He went on to explore different decision-making techniques that we could all utilise to help us to make more informed decisions in our daily life.

This article by Katy Davies explores the subject of resilience and why it is so important. It offers suggestions on how to change your mind-set to be less phased by the challenges of everyday life at work and home. It is based on a presentation delivered at the BIALL Annual Conference in 2019.

In this article Jackie Fishleigh takes a look at the art of negotiation as a skill when trying to reach a fair deal. She draws on her experience in the information and library business whereby she has dealt with publishers and suppliers and, at the end of her article, she provides her own checklist of ten top tips on negotiation.

In this article Jackie Fishleigh reviews and analyses three of the sessions, held at the BIALL Conference 2013 in Glasgow, that were concerned with ‘soft skills’.