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INTRODUCTION
Soft skills are growing their importance year by year. Nowadays, interpersonal skills are the most requested attitude for a workplace. The only problem is that these kinds of abilities are not easy to develop and to analyse because soft skills are varied and are not clearly defined.
They could be stated as the attitudes, traits, attributes and behaviours that are insight into every person. Soft skills are personal qualities and attributes of a person who stands out from other individuals who may have similar hard skills and experience. The term “soft skills” was created to develop a project for the US army. In this kind of project, the researchers were trying to improve workflow and learning efficiency.
A FEW WORDS ON SOFT SKILLS
DEFINING SOFT SKILLS
Soft skills, generic competences or life skills represent the entire traits and characteristics that define a person’s behaviour in a social environment.
Moreover, soft skills can be described as the entire amount of life skills that can be also resumed as the set of life skills which someone uses to have success in life. What is clear is that these kinds of life skills are not mere qualities that you can earn easily.
They are non-specific and non-technical skills; thus, it follows that you cannot learn them just by attending some learning programme. Generic competences are an evolving knowledge that improves during life experiences. Soft knowledge, as Kajnc and Svetlicic (2010) says, is intangible knowledge, difficult to quantify, codify, store and transmit, because it refers to more personal characteristics which are acquired through the application of practical experience.
More specifically, soft skills are intangible skills that define people in different ways. They are not even easy to train because of the need to get practical experience inside of the training. Thus, it follows that you cannot improve soft skills through a simple lesson or reading a book, but you need to attend a specific training.
The role of soft skills is increasing every year. There is also no doubt that phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic impair some of these skills, thus lowering the potential of job candidates taking their first steps on career paths. This situation forces a reorientation in the approach of educational institutions to shaping soft skills. One thing remains undisputed: even the best-educated employee, without developed soft skills, will not be able to effectively translate their professional competencies into their own professional success and into benefits for the organisation they work for.
Research institutes and universities are constantly carrying out research to identify how to prepare their workforce for these challenges. Attempts are being made to identify the competencies and skills that are best suited to these changes and which will be required in the future. In order to have a chance of satisfactory employment in the emerging labour market, it is already necessary to develop certain skills and broaden one's knowledge. As pointed out in the report 'The Future of Skills. Employment in 2030', interpersonal, social, systemic and cognitive skills will count in the coming years. Among the areas that will be necessary to perform the jobs of the future, however, are those related to management, sciences, and, of course, foreign languages. Soft skills of the future are identified in this report as:
Teaching yourself and others,
Active learning and listening,
Interaction,
The art of deduction,
Comprehensive problem solving,
Coordination,
Logical and critical thinking,
Evaluation and decision-making,
Management of financial resources,
Human Resource Management,
Monitoring and evaluation of results,
Negotiation and persuasion,
Clear communication,
Programming,
Rapid response,
Public perception,
Evaluation of systems and processes,
Technology design,
Time management,
Visualisation,
Instruction.
Six factors, developed by the IFTF (Institute for the Future at the University of Phoenix) together with IBM and Walt Disney Studios, are responsible for the changes in recent years that have affected what skills will be attractive in the labour market. These include:
Increasing life expectancy - life expectancy is getting longer, which affects not only the education process but also the perception and planning of career paths.
Technology development - is based on the IT industry. Nowadays, more and more areas are going in the direction of introducing modern changes, departing from traditional solutions. This undoubtedly influences what hard competencies an employee of the future should have and what soft competencies will be necessary to foster effective cooperation in this area.
Social media - communication through this type of media is growing in scale. They are used not only for private purposes but also widely for professional purposes. They require skills that are not only text-related.
Computerisation - there is a trend toward computerisation, with the consequent growth of huge amounts of data.
The rise of global companies - companies like Google are playing an increasingly important role in the market, which also dictates trends in desired skills.
Greater networking and interdependence - at different levels of life e.g. economic, political, and social.
The World Economic Forum's report, The Future of Jobs, on the other hand, looks at employment, skills, and workforce strategy for the future. And it illustrates the changes that are taking place in company directors' assessment of the prioritisation of soft skills over time.
Figure 2: Changes in the prioritisation of soft skills
Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-10-skills-you-need-to-thrive-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/ accessed 20.12.2021
SOFT SKILLS VS HARD SKILLS
Soft skills are non-technical skills while hard skills are specific skills. In order to teach them, it results that hard skills are easier to gain through studying a proper subject and a proper knowledge.
Hard skills are very important and necessary to have success in finding a good job, but just hard skills are not enough because without a right amount of soft skills the knowledge cannot lead in the right way.
Later on, it is very important underlying the relation that exists between soft skills and hard skills. To correctly manage a technical knowledge, it is mandatory operating with a good command of soft skills. They are definitely complementary; one cannot exist without the other. They work simultaneously to increase the human being’s potential, aiming to reach the highest output. The researchers of this scientific branch, regarding the job situation and the job seekers, explain that nowadays, in order to take a competitive advantage, it is more important to have a large number of soft skills rather than hard skills.
To conclude, hard skills merely define your role in the society, labelling you according to the work you do. Instead, soft skills do not stop on the individual role of the people inside the society and go beyond the normal jobs’ demands.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SOFT SKILL
Soft skills are very important for a great development of people’s personalities, but who gets the most profit is the market and so on the enterprises. In fact, life skills are highly requested by the firms, because without them they cannot create a well consolidated teamwork able to express the maximum potential of the company.
Replacing a worker is a failure also in economic terms, because the enterprise loses in this operation a large amount of money. For solving this kind of collapse, the enterprise management needs to stay more connected to executors' soft skills.
So, it is necessary to employ a strong influence able to make interns more sociable and to make them feel from outsiders to insiders within the organisation. Socialising does not help just the interns, but also the boss of the firm because in this way the turnover risks have less probabilities to become real.
Once the on boarding phase is concluded it is of primary importance to continue the motivations’ process for keeping the skills in continuous improvement. In particular, it is extremely recommended to abandon old approaches like the competitive one which has resulted to have an enormously negative influence on all workers.
Instead, flexibility, empathy and capability of understanding different cultures are really appreciated in a workplace which make employers and employees more comfortable within the job context.
HOW TO IMPROVE SOFT SKILLS?
Nevertheless, the main problem remains the way to improve them, because life skills are not easy to develop and to be evaluated. Moreover, establishments where people can improve their social skills are not widespread and the most natural suitable places like schools and enterprises are struggling a lot to keep up with the times. Furthermore, for spreading and improving generic competences, it is necessary to train a new generation of teachers and trainers able to stimulate the interpersonal abilities of the students.
For this kind of reason, teachers need to study soft skills and new methods to pass them to the students. Through the self-improvement of soft skills, a person could be easily introduced within a society and have more successful relations with other people. Therefore, developing soft skills is a way for achieving a better socialisation, implementing abilities which are going to maximise the human connection. To achieve these goals, it is normal to work in a social field where life skills are attainable.
CONCLUSIONS
It is very common to hear about the difficulty of getting hired for new graduate students who do not have job experience. This kind of situation represents a failure for schools and in particular for the universities that cannot properly train their students, displaying a lack of practical skills. Regarding universities, it is true that now there is more awareness about the importance of the training, on the other hand it is not difficult to find universities where practical activities are not mandatory. So, it is clear enough that the gap between the enterprises’ needs and skills provided by universities has not been filled.
The entry into the labour market should be a step that happens in tune between universities and companies, avoiding in this way, any trauma or inconvenience for the interns. To conclude, companies and universities need to cooperate more effectively, in order to create better employers, employees and citizens.
SELF-TEST QUESTIONS
After the essay about soft skills, we learnt a lot about the importance of learning and developing life skills, especially within the company and university. In particular, we highlighted the complementarity between hard skills and soft skills where the last one represents the fundamentals competences in order to become a good employer. In the light of this we observed the crucial role of the professor for the university and recruiter for the company. In fact, the professors need a large number of soft skills to motivate students as much as the recruiters to really comprehend the real abilities of the candidates of the job interview. To conclude we have to take in mind the difficulty of providing soft skills in order to improve the forms of training and the trainer’s formation.
Following you can find a short evaluation test about several issues:
Soft skills’ definition;
Difference between soft skills and hard skills;
Deficit of soft skills.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Nitonde, R., 2014, ‘Soft Skills and Personality Development’ in Dr. Rohidas Nitonde and Prof. Vijaya Nandapurkar (eds.), Proceedings of the National Seminar, Shri Shivaji College, Parbhani (MS) India. ISBN 978-81-925458-3-7.
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WEBSITE BIBLIOGRAPHY:
UKEssays, (November 2018), Definition Of Soft Skills Psychology Essay: https://www.ukessays.com/essays/psychology/definition-of-soft-skills-psychology-essay.php?vref=1, 23/10/2020
Brack, A., Intuitive intelligence, Integration training: https://www.integrationtraining.co.uk/blog/2012/02/intuitive-intelligence/, 23/10/2020
