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 essential for a candidate when he tries to obtain any kind of job (Cimatti, 2016).

Soft Skills are extremely important for every individual to sustain and grow in any work place and in life (Mitchell, 2008). According to (Meeks, 2017) , Having a college diploma or a technical degree does not assure that a person has the abilities to be effective in the work environment, nor does it guarantee a job. Although a university degree is important to employers, a degree is not always a guarantee that a person is fully armed with the skills to meet the needs of the job market. Employers are looking for people who can offer hard skills as well as soft skills. Significant evidence demonstrated that soft skills are competencies that can help an individual better meet the needs of a particular job and help an individual advance in his or her career.

  

Definition

Soft Skills term used to denote a set of intangible personal abilities, behaviors, attributes, habits and attitudes that can be used in many types of jobs and careers (Perreault, 2004). skills include: communication and presentation, leadership, teamwork, analytical thinking and creative problem solving, professional and morality, learning, usage of information technology, development of interpersonal relationship empathy, sense of responsibility, integrity, self-esteem, self-management, motivation, flexibility, sociability, time management and making decisions (Ariratana et al., 2015). The term is also used in contrast to ‘hard’ skills that are considered as more technical, highly specific in nature and particular to an occupation, and that can be imparted more easily than soft skills (UNESCO, 2018).

According to (Dewiyani, 2015), Soft skills can be classified into two, internal and external personal skills. Internal soft skills refer to individual’s ability in managing himself for optimally developing works for example, self-confidence, self-control, accepting criticism, resilience, perseverance, growth mindset time management, stress management and creative thinking. Meanwhile, external soft skills are defined as individual’s skills in managing their relationship with others for optimum work developments, example collaborative team work, networking, adaptability, influence, managing conflicts, ability to motivate, leadership and negotiation. (Schulz, 2008) defines “Soft skills refer to the cluster of personality traits, social graces, facility with language, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that mark people to varying degrees. Soft skills complement hard skills, which are the technical requirements of a job”.

Reference

Ariratana, W., Sirisookslip, S. and Ngang, K. T.(2015) Development of Leadership Soft Skills Among Educational Administrators. 5th World Conference on Learning, Teaching and Educational Leadership.

Cimatti, B. (2016) Definition, development, assessment, of soft skills and their role for the quality of organizations and organization. International Journal for Quality Research.

Dewiyani, M. J. (2015) Improving Students Soft Skills using Thinking Process Profile Based on Personality Types. International Journal of Evaluation and Research in Education (IJERE), 4(3) 119.

Meeks, G. A. (2017) Critical soft skills to achieve success in the workplace. EdD.Walden University.

Mitchell, G.W. (2008) Essential soft skills for success in the twenty-first century workforce as perceived by Alabama Business/Marketing educators. EdD. Auburn University.

Perreault, H. (2004) Business educators can take a leadership role in character education. Business Education Forum, 59(1) 23-24.

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

UNESCO (2018) International Bureau of Education. [online] Geneva:UNESCO. Available from http://www.ibe.unesco.org/en/glossary-curriculum-terminology/s/soft-skills [Accessed 12 December 2018].