These pages have been put together by a range of support departments, including the Library, IT Services, Careers, and Academic Support.

The guides are aimed at all members of the University of York, though some sections may be more applicable to specific groups of students or staff. For more basic digital skills support we also have our IT Essentials guide.

The content of these guides is arranged across the three main themes you'll find at the top of every page:

Academic & communication skills

The academic skills you'll need at university, along with communication skills that will be relevant throughout life.

Digital skills

The skills and literacies for engaging with digital technologies.

Information & research skills

The skills we need for sourcing and engaging with information, and the practices and practicalities of conducting research.

At the top of most Skills Guides you'll also find our Skills Underground train tracks, with links off to related guides:

The Skills Guides can be searched from the University of York website's search box, or from Google and other search engines, and there's also a searchable Index of content.

We run training events throughout the year, most of which are open to all members of the University. Find out more on our Training page:

The Skills Guides are a collaboration between a number of support teams at the University of York:

We've put together a guide to help staff who are looking for ways to incorporate digital skills into taught modules and programmes:

Almost everything on the Skills Guides (slide-decks included) is published under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence so do feel free to make use of what you find on these pages (within the bounds of that licence).

For any Google Workspace documents, you'll usually be able to make your own copy by going to File > Make a copy within the document itself.

You can link directly to a Skills Guides page, or even to a specific box on a page. You can get a link to most boxes by using the icon in the top right-hand corner of that box. Boxes even have additional links to stand-alone versions (indicated by in the top right-hand corner of most boxes as well as in our Index) should you just want to highlight specific content in isolation.

A lot of our content can also be directly embedded into webpages or the VLE. Take these boxes, for instance, like this "Reusing content" box you're reading now. You'll find most boxes indexed on our Index page, where you can also flick a toggle to show the HTML to use to embed such boxes elsewhere. You can do the same for videos and slide decks too (though not all of these will be in the index).

Embed code example

Not all boxes are listed in the index. To embed any Skills Guides box, copy the link for the pop-out button in the top right of the box you want to reuse, and use it with the following code snippet (replacing the holding text):

The embed codes make use of inline frames (iframes), which are not always the most elegant way to reuse content. If you'd like help reusing our content in a more substantive way, get in touch with the Library's digital skills team.