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Bridge Your Soft Skills Gap

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Introduction For decades employers as well as educators frequently complain about a lack in soft skills among graduates from universities and education institutions. Mostly missed are communication skills, but additional knowledge in entrepreneurship, business or project management is also ranking highly on the list of missing skills desirable for graduates entering the corporate world. This problem is no way to limited developing nations like Sri Lanka, but also to developed countries. Soft Skills is a very popular term nowadays, used to indicate personal transversal competences such as social aptitudes, language and communication capability, friendliness and ability of working in team and other personality traits that characterize relationships between people. Soft Skills are traditionally considered complementary of Hard Skills, which are the abilities to perform a certain type of task or activity. Soft Skills are strategic to be successful in personal and professional l...
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Most Changing Skills

soft skills depends very much on the context and one’s personal awareness. However, there is one property that directly comes to most people’s mind when soft skills are mentioned: those are the communication skills. And indeed, it is the talent of communication skills, which is mostly lacking among graduates from colleges and universities (Schulz, 2008). The next more commonly cited skill was critical thinking, although there was significant argument about its definition and how it related to other intellectual skills. Critical thinking requires an attitude of open-mindedness, an ability to accept vagueness and to question one’s own opinions, and an responsiveness of the impact of emotion and individual experience on one’s views  (Cukier  et al ., 2015). “Creativity will become one of the top skills workers will need. With the avalanche of new products, new technologies and new ways of working, workers are going to have to become more creative in order to benefit from the...
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Practical Application

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“For decades, major emphasis of the education system as well as of the organizations was on IQ rather than EQ. A student who has scored high in the exam is considered to be a good student and others are considered to be poor. The emphasis was merely on the logical, analytical reasoning, verbal skills, math skills. Earlier researcher believed that a good IQ guarantees success in life. But now, despite good IQ level and great analytical skills, employees are failing miserably on the professional front. It was then realized that mere dependence on IQ does not guarantee success in life as it is a narrow concept and does not consider the wide knowledge and abilities of a fertile human mind. Therefore, now researchers are focusing on the emotional aspect which helps an individual to be aware about his/ her emotions as well as the emotions of others. Research has shown that IQ is important to get an entry in the organization but afterwards it is EQ that guarantees success to an individual” ...
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Hard Skills vs Soft skills

Hard Skills Hard skills are teachable abilities or skill sets that are easy to measure and learned in the classroom, through books or other training materials, or on the job (Deen, 2017). Example: §    Banking, engineering, accounting, teaching, manufacturing §    Proficiency in a foreign language §    Analysis, research §    Legal, medical, technical §    Rules stay the same irrespective of Company or Culture Soft Skills Soft skills are fundamentally people's skills or behavior specific skills. soft skills are non-technical, intangible, personality specific skills which determines an individual's strength as a leader, listener and negotiator, or as a conflict negotiator. Soft skills are the characters and capabilities of attitude and behaviour rather than of knowledge or technical aptitude (John, 2015). Example: §    attitude, Flexibility, Teamwork, leadership §    communication, Persua...
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Importance of soft skills

According to (Sejzi  et al ., 2013) Soft skills play a highly significant role in the work place as well as in one’s career and personal success. Similarly,  As per (John, 2015) “Soft skills play a very important role in this dynamic commercial age. Today there is a huge mass of qualified job seekers existing in the society and the competition within them for job acquisition and job sustainability is becoming tougher. To get an edge over the competitors they are left with no other choice but to add worth to their hard skills with soft skills to exhibit their true potential”. As stated by (Schulz, 2008) there are many reasons for having a serious look at person’s soft skills, one of the reasons is today’s job-market, which in many fields is becoming increasingly competitive.  To be competitive in this tough and challenging market , candidates for jobs have to bring along a “competitive edge” that differentiate them from other competitors with similar professional an...
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Introduction

For decades employers as well as educators frequently complain about a lack in soft skills among graduates from universities and education institutions. Mostly missed are communication skills, but additional knowledge in entrepreneurship, business or project management is also ranking highly on the list of missing skills desirable for graduates entering the corporate world. This problem is no way to limited developing nations like Sri Lanka, but also to developed countries. Soft Skills is a very popular term nowadays, used to indicate personal transversal competences such as social aptitudes, language and communication capability, friendliness and ability of working in team and other personality traits that characterize relationships between people. Soft Skills are traditionally considered complementary of Hard Skills, which are the abilities to perform a certain type of task or activity. Soft Skills are strategic to be successful in personal and professional life then are essenti...
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