Experimental skills should be acquired by learners at school and university alike. To promote experimental skills, various approaches exist within a spectrum between implicit and explicit instruction. Regarding these instructional approaches, numerous findings are available which predominantly relate to pupils. It is an open question whether it is better to instruct experimental skills explicitly or implicitly in university courses. And if experimental skills are fostered explicitly, what about the content-related skills? Especially in teaching programmes with both experiment-related and content-related objectives, it is questionable whether content-related objectives are achieved to a lesser degree via explicit instruction of experimental skills. Both questions are addressed in this paper. We present an intervention study involving 144 students. All students carry out the same experiments. The intervention groups differ merely in the degree of explicit instruction. Learning gains in experimental and content-related skills are assessed in a pre-/post-test design. The results show that the type of instruction does not significantly influence the acquisition of experimental and content-related skills in this target group. But by trend, the expected differences in learning gains can be observed. This leads to new research perspectives and implications for teaching which are discussed.