As the skills required to succeed in the workplace of the future continue to evolve, Dr Matthew Barr, programme director for the University of Glasgow’s Graduate Apprenticeship, advocates for work-based learning as a means of preparing students for success.
The future workplace demands professionals who can adapt to rapidly evolving contexts, communicate with diverse audiences, and continuously learn throughout their careers. Yet traditional undergraduate programmes often struggle to develop these capabilities – the meta-skills and professional dispositions that transcend specific technical knowledge. Work-based learning programmes, particularly degree-level apprenticeships, offer a promising alternative. But what makes them effective, and what role does reflection play in turning workplace experience into lasting learning? As we’ll see below, at least part of the answer lies in the confidence that this experience develops, and that reflective practice reveals.
At the University of Glasgow, we run a four-year Software Engineering apprenticeship degree where students spend approximately 80% of their time in the workplace and the remainder on campus. Over the years, we have been studying how our students develop as reflective practitioners and how they navigate the transfer of skills between university and the workplace. Two recent studies – one longitudinal, tracking a cohort over all four years, and one cross-sectional, examining 58 students in their third and fourth years – offer complementary perspectives on these questions.
Why reflection matters
Reflection is central to work-based learning. Drawing on Raelin’s model, we understand the learning journey as moving from conceptualisation in the classroom, through experimentation, to real-world experience in the workplace. But without reflection, the learning that occurs through experience remains tacit – limited to particular behaviours and difficult to transfer to new situations. Reflection helps convert at least some of that tacit learning into explicit knowledge, leading to what Raelin describes as a reconstruction of meaning. On our programme, this reflective component takes the form of assessed reflective essays: if we want students to learn from experience, we need to give them the tools and the incentive to reflect on it.
How reflection develops over time
Using two established models of reflective practice – Boud et al.’s Model of Reflective Process and Bain et al.’s 5R Framework – we analysed students’ reflective reports across all four years of the programme. The results show clear development. In their first year, students typically demonstrate only basic forms of reflection, such as reporting on their experiences. By later years, more sophisticated forms of reflection become markedly more prevalent. Students increasingly demonstrate appropriation (making new knowledge their own), identify changes in their behaviour or perspective as a result of reflection, and draw conclusions that inform their future practice. By Year 4, every student demonstrates evidence of reconstructing their experience and planning ahead based on what they have learned.
Perhaps most encouragingly, students begin to engage in what might be called meta-reflection – reflecting on the value of reflective practice itself. This suggests that the habit of reflection, once established, becomes self-sustaining: a genuinely transferable capability rather than a hoop to jump through.
Complementary learning environments
Our analysis of how students perceive skill transfer reveals that university and workplace provide genuinely complementary learning environments. University provides foundational knowledge and theoretical frameworks. The workplace enables practical application and refinement, develops the ability to switch between different tasks and contexts, and cultivates professional dispositions such as leadership and adaptability that cannot be fully simulated in academic settings.
Critically, we found that skill transfer is not a simple one-way progression from university to workplace. Instead, there is a dynamic feedback loop: workplace experiences inform academic understanding, while academic frameworks provide tools for workplace problem-solving. One student noted how a research methods module helped with workplace tasks, while their professional experience fed back into their approach to academic study.
Reflection is the mechanism that makes this bidirectional transfer explicit and intentional.
Confidence as catalyst
A striking theme across both studies is the role of confidence. Many students begin their apprenticeship with feelings of (understandable) apprehension at entering a professional environment. Over time, workplace experience builds confidence, which in turn underpins the development of multiple other competencies, from communication and collaboration to initiative and leadership. This finding resonates beyond any single discipline: confidence is not usually something we teach directly, but structured workplace experience paired with reflective practice appears to develop it organically.
What this means for programme design
Our findings suggest several considerations for colleagues designing or enhancing programmes with a work-based learning component. First, curriculum alignment matters: foundational modules should connect with the realities students will encounter in their workplaces, and communication and presentation components transfer particularly well to professional settings. Second, we should recognise that skills develop best in sequence – foundations introduced at university and then refined in the workplace – while accepting that some competencies, such as adaptability and context switching, will develop primarily through authentic professional experience. Third, reflective assignments serve a dual purpose: they are both an assessment tool and a mechanism for supporting skill integration, helping students make their learning visible and transferable.
With ongoing debates about how degree-level apprenticeships are developed, funded and delivered across the UK, our experience suggests that structured work-based learning paired with reflective practice develops exactly the adaptive capabilities that employers and society will require. Students learn not just specific knowledge but how to keep learning; not just current practices but how to adapt to new contexts; not just how to solve today’s problems but how to approach tomorrow’s challenges. The reflective component proves essential – transforming tacit workplace learning into explicit, transferable knowledge and producing graduates who are ready for an uncertain future.
Matthew Barr is Head of Education & Practice at the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, and leads the Graduate Apprenticeship in Software Engineering. His first book, Graduate Skills and Game-Based Learning, was published in 2019. An edited collection, Approaches to Work-Based Learning in Higher Education, followed in 2024.
References
This post draws on research published by Matthew Barr, Oana Andrei, Syed Waqar Nabi, and Alistair Morrison, School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow:
Andrei, O., Barr, M., Nabi, S. W., & Morrison, A. (2025). Understanding Skill Transfer Between University and Workplace Through Reflective Practice: A Software Engineering Work-Based Learning Experience. Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, ITiCSE 2025, 368–374. https://doi.org/10.1145/3724363.3729119
Barr, M., Nabi, S. W., & Andrei, O. (2025). The Development of Reflective Practice on a Work-Based Software Engineering Program: A Longitudinal Study. 2025 IEEE/ACM 37th International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T), 53–61. https://doi.org/10.1109/CSEET66350.2025.00012
