Exercise 4: Your Skills

There’s a huge range of skills, knowledge and understanding that are important to you as a creative practitioner. The practical tools you need to realise your ideas into finished work and the visual awareness of the culture you live and work in are essential aspects of your skillset, and both are ever-changing. You’ll need to find ways of supporting your continued learning of skills, knowledge and techniques and feeding your ideas through a broad cultural awareness.

With support from your tutor, this exercise requires you to identify the skills you’d like to develop, access the appropriate resources to learn and expand your practice independently.

Skills Hub

The Skills Hub (SH) provides a range of learning materials drawn from specialist degree pathways. Materials are collated in downloadable PDF documents with links to some additional video material.

Each document provides content and activities to introduce and practically explore the subject. We have designed these to be bite-sized chunks of learning, where you can develop your creative skills with opportunities to independently test your skills and then apply what you have acquired to your ideas contained in this unit.

The A-Z of resources provides a central hub to access these materials. Use it to browse or search for available skills resources throughout your OCA studies.

Learning to Learn

Take stock of the tools and skills you have available to you. This could be discipline-specific or more practical skills like word processing, or skills gleaned from outside your creative practice. Make a list and reflect on how well you know how to use these tools and what you’d most like to learn.

Identify resources within the Skills Hub and online that can help support you in developing your ability to expand your knowledge and skill set. Don’t worry about trying to learn everything immediately; you’ll have plenty of opportunities to develop your skills as you progress through the stage.

Start by visiting the Skills Hub resources, or talk to fellow students who have found solutions to some of the issues you’ve encountered.

Learning Opportunities

Alongside the Skills Hub, you also have access to The Library and the Academic Support Hub. These areas combined offer you a wealth of resources to support self-directed learning throughout your studies with OCA.