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 and academic qualifications and similar evaluation results. As per (Majid et al., 2012) it is now a proven fact that companies are increasingly putting more weight on soft skills, it is equally important that candidates should also sufficiently appreciate the value of such skills and make serious efforts to gain them.

Recent research (Ramlan and Ngah, 2015) has been identified that most engineering students graduate with acquisition of technical skills, fail to get a job due to lack of soft skills. It is also being the biggest challenge for institutions of higher learning to develop employable skills, enhance knowledge and make graduates more attractive to employers. Evidence from surveys suggested that employers are more concerned about soft skills or attitudes rather than technical knowledge or competencies. The new situation cannot be overlooked and evidence bears out that businesses need these skills to ensure success as much as employees need them to ensure they are able to do their jobs. Even in highly technical roles such as IT, professionals with wide and deep knowledge of their subject are increasingly finding it difficult to get hired because they lack harmonizing people skills (World Economic Forum, 2016). Apparently, Soft skills play a highly significant role in the work place as well as in one’s career and personal success (Sejzi et al., 2013).


Reference
John, J. (2015) Study on the impact of the soft skills training programme on the soft skills development of management students. Jaipur:Researchgate.p.20.

Majid, S., Liming, Z., Tong, S. and Raihana, S. (2012) Importance of Soft Skills for Education and Career Success. International Journal for Cross-Disciplinary Subjects in Education (IJCDSE),2 (2).

Ramlan, S. and Ngah, S. (2015) Student perception on the importance of soft skills for education and employement. International Journal of Social Sciences.

Sejzi, A. A., Aris, B. and Yuh, C.P. (2013) Important soft skills for university students in 21st century. 4 th International Graduate Conference on Engineering, Science, and Humanities (IGCESH 2013).

Schulz, B.  (2008) The Importance of Soft Skills: Education beyond academic knowledge. Journal of Language and Communication.146

World Economic Forum (2016) The 10 skills you need to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution. [online] Geneva:World Economic Forum. Available from   

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-10-skills-you-need-to-thrive-in-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/ [Accessed 13 December 2018]