The Saints Skills Builder Award is a new award at the University of St Andrews, which recognises students' personal development of their graduate attributes.

The University's 20 graduate attributes are grouped into five key areas: Social and Responsible, Valuing Diversity, Global Outlook, Leadership Skills, and Entrepreneurial Mindset.

You can develop these graduate attributes through a range of curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular activities.

For example, being a member of a society or club like a basketball club or beekeeping society, taking on a leadership position in a group assignment, attending a seed workshop, or conducting fieldwork as part of your module.

By developing and reflecting on these graduate attributes, you will support your studies and research, as well as increasing your employability after your time at St Andrews.

This award is a great opportunity to build up your employability skills and learn how to best articulate these skills for future employment or future studies.

All undergraduates and postgraduates are eligible for the award, which is recognised on your HEAR transcript.

How do you gain this award?

Firstly, log on to the graduate attributes portal.

Next, select My Saints Skills Builder Award in the menu on the left-hand side of the webpage.

There are four sections to the Skills Builder Award.

Firstly, you document and reflect on the co-curricular training that you participated in at the start of your degree programme.

This is where you learned about good academic practice, equality, diversity and inclusivity, and other core university values.

You then identify the overlap between your own personal values and the university's graduate attributes to reflect on what topics you place personal value on.

Next, in the second section, you complete an Ability Profile where you reflect on your current ability and skill level of each of the graduate attributes and what level of ability you would like to develop for each graduate attribute.

At the end, you will be shown a spider's web of your current skill level in relation to your desired level.

You will also be given suggestions of which graduate attributes you might want to develop further.

After analysing your skills, you start logging all your activities which are developing your graduate attributes.

You can sign in and log these activities at any time during your degree.

You will notice that every time you log a new activity, your pie chart on the right-hand side of the screen will change in relation to which of the five key areas of the graduate attributes you have been documenting in this portal.

Once you have logged 20 activities in the portal, you perform a final reflection about your skills development journey.

Then press submit and congratulations, you have successfully completed the Saints Skills Builder Award.

More information can be found by visiting the Saints Skills Builder Award web page.