But something I thought of – the impression is that all this skill stuff is all to do with what employers want and that we’re forcing our arts and humanities graduates to fit this mould, which is designed for the sciences. Obviously the government wants us to make lots of money for the economy and to engage in all this sort of knowledge transfer activity. But are they not really talking about scientists making interesting inventions, which they can then sell on the open market and be internationally competitive. I mean, how does all this relate to arts and humanities?

Ross: I think this is a real issue. I mean the whole agenda is really often based around the fact that PhDs were seen as one-track route into academia. And really when you look at it less than a third of the arts and humanities PhD graduates will go into lectureships. And so this is not a theoretical thing where the government are thinking ‘wouldn’t it be nice to push people outside of universities’ this is going to be a reality faced by PhD students in the arts and humanities. And really we’re going to look at how we give them options to take the career they want. Now it has often been thought that this is about giving them the things that employers want, but there is also a problem that employers have problems with perceptions as well. There was a recent survey done by the University of Sheffield and they asked employers in Yorkshire what they thought of PhD graduates and a lot of the reactions were very negative. They saw them as being too specialist, had no commercial awareness, they saw them as basically being these people who knew a lot about one thing and not anything about any others. And so there is a need for education on both sides and I think when a lot of PhD students apply to jobs outside of academia they don’t realise what skills they have. They either put the PhD down under the qualifications and expect people to know what it is, or they try and not mention it at all because it is not really relevant for this job ‘why do they want to know about my knowledge of 17^th century Italian art’. When really, to have a PhD is to be able to manage your own time, it is to be able to run your own project. It is to be able to take a huge amount of complex information and distil it down into readable and understandable chunks, to pick out very quickly what’s important and what’s not and to communicate that to people. And so I think that this whole idea of sort of the skills agenda to push you into some sort of corporate model is really sort of missing the point as to what’s going on here. A lot of this is about educating the PhD student as to what their options are, to what their own skills are, to how they can develop them. But I thought that we also must recognise there is a need to educate people from outside of academia into what it is to have a PhD.