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INTRODUCTION
The desire to increase the quality and effectiveness of higher education leads University teachers to question the activities to offer to the students of their course, in addition to intellectual stimuli and operational experiences.
The planning of training activities aimed at the development of soft skills implies, on the one hand, the identification of the characteristics and components that characterise them and, on the other, the making of a balance of those already acquired by the students.
The teaching activities proposed, which can be delivered in class or online, alternating moments of discussion in person and at a distance, must be designed to really support students and their potential.
Specifically, it is possible to describe: the perception of self-determination, that is the sense of being at the origin of one’s choices and actions; the perception of having available the internal resources necessary to achieve the desired objectives; the capability of managing oneself in carrying out the tasks entrusted or chosen; the sense of progress, the perception that through one’s commitment one can improve.
The fourth industrial revolution is completely transforming the labour market. Machines can now also replace humans in decision-making and processing tasks and are capable of learning. The added value of people in the present and future productive world is therefore linked to what machines do not know and cannot do: creativity, lateral thinking, communication.
Both for those who enter or are in the world of work, and for those who manage simple and complex organisations, it is important to manage the relevant dimensions at the basis of soft skills, with particular regard to creativity and lateral thinking. Scientific evidence tells us that the current training and management system of human resources does not favour the development of these skills.
HOW TO RAISE THE AWARENESS OF STUDENTS ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE TO DEVELOP THEIR SOFT SKILLS
Soft skills are personal and characteristics that are different and transversal with respect to the technical skills learned in training courses and during work experiences. Here are some particularly important ones to focus on in higher education institutions:
ability to work in a team;
ability to work under stress;
negotiation;
problem solving;
determination in the achievement of objectives;
flexibility and organisational capacity;
management of the unexpected;
communication skills;
time management;
leadership.
Whether you want to be a freelancer, manager, or entrepreneur, it is essential to know that you must already learn from the University to recognize and develop soft skills in the best possible way. Soft skills and hard skills (meaning by hard skills technical, specialist and verifiable skills) go hand in hand in the structure of a complete and current professional figure. According to numerous recent studies it even seems that in the business world as much as 75% of the success of a job depends on the possession of soft skills. But if hard skills require years of studies, updates and practical-work experience, soft skills are even more difficult to transfer and assimilate in University contexts, according to ordinary learning schemes and even more so they are very difficult to evaluate quantitatively and qualitatively. It is from this urgency that the idea was born of ensuring that there is great attention in the design of study courses in universities, based on training and laboratory courses focused on the acquisition of these fundamental aspects and which, therefore, give students the opportunity to demonstrate one’s preparation in this area as well.
Soft skills are transversal skills that can be divided in turn into internal skills and concern the way in which the student or worker interacts with himself and external skills, which instead have to do with the way in which the relationships with others. What is important to understand when it comes to soft skills is that beyond the character attitude of the students, which makes them more or less inclined to develop certain soft skills than others are that the more students will assimilate and mature these incredible skills, the more ready they will be to introduce themselves and preside over the world of work.
Precision, resistance to stress, problem solving. These are just some of the famous soft skills that are much sought after in the workplace today. These are transversal skills that you need to have to successfully face the world of work and which, precisely for this reason, make teachers busy preparing students for their first and true look at work talk so much.
Soft skills of personal effectiveness develop skills such as creativity and balance, fundamental factors in the workplace and necessary for solving problems even in the case of static tasks.
Skills in the relational field increase the ability to work in a team and to cooperate for the achievement of objectives. Among these, ethics and tolerance allow us to manage the stress caused by dysfunctional relationships and to adopt behaviours appropriate to shared norms and values.
Another determining aspect is the ability to make decisions and to negotiate, which improves thanks to the development of flexibility, empathic listening, and rational detachment. The skills oriented towards self-realisation, on the other hand, mainly concern the ability to evaluate, from which the selection, correct management and enhancement of information derives. The soft skills that can be considered fundamental for a University context are at least 14 and more specifically:
Autonomy: ability to carry out assigned tasks without the need for constant supervision by resorting to one’s own resources.
Self-confidence: the awareness of one’s own worth, one’s abilities and one’s ideas beyond the opinions of others.
Flexibility and adaptability: knowing how to adapt to changing working contexts, being open to news and willing to collaborate with people with points of view that are also different from one’s own.
Stress resistance: the ability to react positively to work pressure while maintaining control, staying focused on priorities, and not transferring any tensions to others.
Ability to plan and organise: the ability to implement ideas, identifying objectives and priorities and, taking into account the time available, plan the process, organising resources.
Precision and attention to detail: the attitude to be accurate, diligent, and attentive to what you do, taking care of the details and the details towards the final result.
Continuous learning: the ability to recognize one’s own gaps and areas for improvement, taking action to acquire and improve one’s knowledge and skills more and more.
Achieve objectives: the commitment, the ability, the determination that goes into achieving the objectives assigned and, if possible, exceed them.
Manage information: ability to acquire, organise and effectively reformulate data and knowledge from different sources, towards a defined goal.
Being enterprising and spirit of initiative: the ability to develop ideas and know how to organise them into projects for which realisation is pursued, even taking risks to succeed.
Communication skills: the ability to transmit and share ideas and information in a clear and concise way with all one’s interlocutors, to listen to them and to interact effectively with them.
Problem solving: an approach to work which, by identifying priorities and criticalities, allows to identify the possible best solutions to problems.
Teamwork: the willingness to work and collaborate with others, having the desire to build positive relationships aimed at achieving the assigned task.
Leadership: the innate ability to lead, motivate and lead others towards ambitious goals and objectives, creating consensus and trust.
The Universities, with very abundant up to date educational programs, continuous checks and frequent questions, often have a rather rigid structure and do not particularly develop transversal skills in children, which are fundamental to successfully face the world of work and beyond.
It is essential to accompany students towards a true educational success, also through in-depth studies on highly topical issues. What are soft skills? How to promote them in school and daily life contexts? Why are they so important in modern workplaces?
HOW TO TEACH AND DEVELOP SOFT SKILLS?
There are numerous ways to teach soft skills and there is not one universal; thus, it follows that every educational institution and enterprise uses many different soft skills applications without a proper guideline. Of course, during the last decades, the debate about soft skills has been getting more attention, but there is not a proper effective application for learning soft skills yet, also because changing a well-established work system within an enterprise is an extremely difficult operation.
The importance of transversal skills is therefore increasingly understood also by University teachers. They are skills directly related to the way of being with oneself and with others and allow you to enhance your technical skills and your person, both in social contexts such as University and family ones, and in work contexts. It becomes essential to propose to lead to an ever-greater awareness of the role of Soft Skills in the growth path of students and to encourage the development of complementary skills to the technical/professional ones during the academic path.
Usually, a path includes a certain number of total hours of training, structured in meetings. The group of participants must be composed of participants possibly divided into subgroups during the lessons, in order to guarantee an adequate development of the interactive and active activities.
The training path should include the development of the following contents:
Intensifying soft skills: transversal personal, cognitive, relational, and organisational skills. Other aspects that can be considered are the experiential methodology, the training of subgroups according to the “Social style model”, the communication and learning styles, and the learning goal construction
Development of target skills through the effective adoption of the experiential methodology by specifically the application of the “Kolb Cycle” (1984) also called “Experiential learning cycle”. It consists of the following different particular phases: 1) activity and experience, 2) reflection and debriefing, 3) conceptualization, 4) experimentation.
In detail there are some simple steps to follow:
The learner goes through a new experience or has a new perspective into an existing experience.
The learner then interprets and reflects on the new experience.
The individual learns from the experience through abstract conceptualisation – the learning experience is put into a new context.
The learner then applies this new idea or understanding to reality to test its validity.
Intermediate briefing.
Timeline of reflection; Summary of the individual and group path.
Use of feedback tools through project works and in-depth analysis.
Furthermore, it is suggested to organise at least one further reflection event on the achievement of the learning objectives and on the group’s experience carried out, through verification and final evaluation. The organisation of a celebration event is also important.
Without any doubts, nowadays, the most important innovative tools are those which imply the use of informatic technologies like writing courses, old self-learning, training in presentations, integration of activity developing soft skills, web courses and thesis projects. Moreover, recent studies assume that providing only soft skills without any support is completely useless. Therefore, it emerges that for truly improving soft skills it is necessary to combine them with hard skills, creating a lesson focused on a well-tuned mix of subjects and interpersonal skills. Of course, since social skills are not tangible knowledge, it follows that they are in continuous growth and they need to be constantly trained. In the light of this, commitment, involvement and habituation are very important for improving soft skills’ programmes.
The educational offer must clearly delineate these skills, providing some tools to identify and improve them, based on lessons, moments of verification and support for improving the work done by the students. Below are specific elements that the training offer must always consider to fit the real needs of workplaces and social interactive contexts:
skills of personal effectiveness;
relational and service skills;
skills related to impact and influence;
skills oriented towards realisation;
cognitive skills.
It therefore becomes essential to have an interactive teaching methodology and to foresee numerous individual and group practical exercises, with the support of external testimonies. The speakers must come, in part, from the world of work and, possibly, also from consultancy in the field of human resources.
In order to achieve the learning outcomes expected in a University course, it becomes essential to set the following objectives in each course:
acquisition of knowledge on the functioning of the selection processes in the company (individual and group), of the actors involved and the main tools used (curriculum vitae, selection interview, announcements, etc.);
acquisition of knowledge relating to the soft skills possessed by the student with a view to looking for work,
acquisition of knowledge on effective communication in the context of selection;
acquisition of knowledge on how to set up a personal action plan for job search;
acquisition of knowledge on some occupational perspectives of the course with the support of professionals from the world of work.
The proposed objectives include the use of numerous individual and group exercises, such as group assessment simulations and individual interviews, public speaking, public discussions, ex-ante and ex-post evaluation tests, etc.
TEACHERS TRAINING
For providing soft skills to students, it is also necessary to have a good command of soft skills related to teaching job fields. First of all, the most important mission that a professor has to pursue is to get a close relationship with their students.
The fundamental personal abilities that professors need to manage for providing a well education are (States et al 2018):
Communicating high expectations: increasing high expectations is a core task that the teachers have to deal with. Providing high expectations to students makes them more positive and encourages them to study more actively. Moreover, the professors have to be trained in
