Skill’Ed Project Awarded Grassfields Grant 2025
The 2025 Grassfields grant has been awarded to Skill’Ed, an interfaculty initiative aimed at supporting students in developing transferable skills and preparing for the job market. Skill’Ed was selected by the review committee for its strong alignment with our educational vision and strategic plan, the maturity and proven effectiveness of the project, and its clear potential to strengthen education across all faculties.
About Skill’Ed
Developing the 13 shared transferable skills is essential for a successful transition to the job market. Currently, the support available to students in this area largely depends on the faculty in which they are enrolled. With Skill’Ed, Science, Social Science, Humanities, Governance and Global Affairs, Archeology, Leiden University Librarier, and Student Support Services are joining forces to effectively connect existing initiatives and further develop them together. This benefits not only our students but also our lecturers and teaching support staff.
The foundation of Skill’Ed is the Science Skills Platform, an extensive digital learning environment developed within the Faculty of Science. The platform already offers over 100 modules for exploring and applying transferable skills such as project management, effective collaboration, designing a research strategy, or delivering a professional presentation. With the Grassfields grant, the team can scale up the Skill’Ed environment and enrich it with materials from other faculties, ensuring that all students have access to proven, effective support.
Lecturers and teaching support staff in the team will also continue developing a teacher toolkit with skill-based assignments, rubrics, and learning activities that can be directly integrated into existing curricula without increasing workload. This enables lecturers to make transferable skills more visible and integrate relevant support directly into their courses. Teacher Support Desks will receive practical guides to assist lecturers in this process.
To streamline interfaculty collaboration, the Skill’Ed team will establish a skills expertise hub at the start of the project to share knowledge and materials, exchange experiences, and set priorities for joint development. This hub will not be a closed group: faculties not yet involved are more than welcome to join during the project.
Why Skill’Ed Was Selected
Skill’Ed was chosen because it presented the most mature and scalable proposal, clearly ready for university-wide implementation. The project strongly aligns with Leiden University’s educational vision, which prioritizes the integrated development of transferable skills and job market preparation. Thanks to its proven results within an existing faculty, broad support across multiple faculties, a sustainable implementation strategy that builds on existing infrastructure, and the ability to integrate future skills initiatives, Skill’Ed offers the greatest strategic impact and long-term value for the university’s educational ecosystem.
Final Reflections and Next Steps
More information about the Skill’Ed project will follow in the coming months. The review committee emphasized the high quality of all submitted projects this year and expressed their appreciation for the dedication and creativity of all project teams.
Although only one proposal can be awarded the Grassfields grant, all teams are encouraged to continue developing their ideas and look ahead to the next Grassfields round. More information about the 2026 cycle will be shared in the spring.
Skill'Ed was made possible thanks to the efforts of a broad group of colleagues, consisting of both teaching and support staff: Marjo de Graauw, Lisann Brincker, Wybrigje de Vries, Iris Hoogesteger, Anouk van der Weiden, Mieneke van der Salm, Janita Ravesloot, Arnout van Ree, Annebeth Simonsz, Ferdinand Harmsen, Anna Benjamins, Anne Zwetsloot, Petra van den Bekerom, Eden Lutz, Praneet Khandal, Tamar van der Riet, Roos van Oosten, Marjet de Ruyter, Ilse Huijskens, Sonja Wagenaar, Sjors Clemens and Simone Lammertink.