Develop interview skills

Getting learners to carry out interviews with subject experts or be interviewed themselves develops their skills and helps keep them in touch with the latest research in their area of interest.

You can use interviews with experts to keep learners up to date with the latest research and innovations in their professional field or personal interests.

Learners can benefit from understanding interview skills in many ways, including:

• having to think about how to prepare questions for an interview

• reading an expert’s work or watching videos to extend their knowledge as part of interview preparation

• being interviewed themselves if they have professional experience in your course subject 

• having to recall and organise what they’ve found out or learned

How to develop interview activities

Here's one way of developing learners' interview skills.

1. Start by prompting learners to identify a suitable expert for the course they’re studying.

2. See if they can arrange the interview.

3. Make sure learners understand ethical issues and how to get appropriate consent.

Learners can carry out interviews in various ways:

• face-to-face - recording and reporting on it

• in small groups, taking turns to ask questions and observe

• recording a video and uploading it

• interviewing experts with different views or specialisms to form a jigsaw picture of a subject area

• being interviewed themselves as emerging specialists in their field