The Growing Importance of Soft Skills in College Curricula for Future Employment

Soft skills are needed in any industry today. We are going to tell you what competencies are included in the list of soft skills and why it is important to add them to college curricula.

Applicants who are going to enter college need to understand that they will need to demonstrate soft skills at the stage of writing the admissions essay. If you do not know how to do this correctly, get help from a personal statement writer service that will help with your paper quickly.

What types of skills are there?

Hard skills are professional or technical skills. We acquire them in the learning process and hone them by applying them in our work. Hard skills can be measured quite accurately: you can determine and indicate your level of English, your level of proficiency in a particular program, and your driving experience.

Soft skills are skills that are not related to a specific profession or specialty. They reflect personal qualities: their ability to communicate with people, effectively organize your time, think creatively, make decisions, and take responsibility.

Who needs soft skills, and why

In the modern world, soft skills are necessary for achieving professional and personal success. They are considered critical when applying for a job and ensure quick career development and high earnings.

Top 10 soft skills

In 2016, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, ten soft skills of the future were formulated; a specialist in any field needs the following:

1. Ability to solve complex problems.
2. Critical thinking.
3. Creative thinking.
4. Ability to manage people.
5. Ability to work in a team.
6. Ability to recognize emotions and manage them.
7. Ability to form judgments and make decisions.
8. Customer focus.
9. Negotiating.
10. Switching from one task to another.

As for college curricula, every student needs to develop the following competencies in order to be in demand in the labor market in the future:

• Critical thinking — the ability to evaluate information coming from outside critically, analyze it and check its reliability, see cause-and-effect relationships, draw conclusions, discard the unnecessary and highlight the main thing.
• Creativity — the ability to think outside the box, find unexpected solutions to a problem, and flexibly respond to changes.
• Communication skills — the ability to communicate, convey your thoughts, negotiate, and hear the interlocutor.
• Coordination — the ability to work in a team, take on both leadership and executive functions, distribute roles, and control the execution of tasks.

What do soft skills provide?

Soft skills are necessary not only for building a career. They help you study successfully and interact with loved ones – parents, relatives, and friends. The ability to communicate and clearly express your thoughts helps to quickly capture the attention of the audience during a report or coursework defense and to make a good impression during an exam. The ability to manage your emotions helps you deal with bad moods that interfere with productive study. The ability to manage time and set priorities allows you to save energy when preparing for exams, and the planning skill helps you achieve your goals faster.

The need for soft skills is confirmed in the academic environment. Students should be able to communicate, make quick decisions, or manage other people.

How to develop soft skills

Sports, board games, intellectual games

• Quests. They teach you to think outside the box, distribute roles in a team, quickly identify a problem and find a solution, listen to the opinions of others, and argue your point of view.
• Sports orienteering. It trains the ability to think quickly, make decisions, help other team members, lead and obey, feel and correctly determine the time.
• Board games. Not all board games are suitable for developing soft skills, but only those that require constant interaction with other players, the ability to make quick decisions, recognize emotions, negotiate, and anticipate the actions of players: Munchkin, Mafia, Monopoly.
• Sports games. Relay races and team games (football, volleyball, basketball) train leadership qualities, discipline, and the ability to perceive criticism and accept defeats with dignity.

Project work at school

During the implementation of school projects, the skills of distributing roles, leading and obeying, discussing a topic, making arguments, analyzing information, and drawing conclusions are developed, and planning and public speaking skills are trained.

Extracurricular activities at school

To develop soft skills, take part in the preparation of holidays, performances, competitions, and quizzes. For example, a drama club will teach you to find a common language with different people and confidently act on stage. Publishing a school newspaper will teach you to understand people and their needs, work with information, and offer different solutions to problems. The more diverse the extracurricular activities, the more soft skills you can acquire.

Educational camps

An educational camp is one of the new modern forms of training, allowing you to acquire both hard and soft skills simultaneously. Any educational camp necessarily has two areas:

1. Training skills in the professional field to which the camp is dedicated: physics, mathematics, programming, graphic design, and journalism. It takes place in the form of lessons, lectures, and workshops where teachers share their professional secrets.
2. Training communication skills and teamwork. For this purpose, special lectures, quizzes, board game tournaments, and sports competitions are organized in the educational camp.

Courses

Many soft skills can be learned in special trainings or courses held in person or online. You can learn time management and creativity in online courses. However, communication and teamwork skills are best learned in person. Career guidance and self-determination training are useful for developing soft skills – they will help you identify strengths and weaknesses and understand which soft skills have already been mastered at a sufficient level and which need to be developed.

What to remember

1. All skills are divided into “hard” and “soft” skills. Hard skills are professional abilities, and soft skills are universal competencies and personal qualities.
2. ‍Soft skills are divided into four groups — communication, intellectual (critical thinking, creativity), volitional (time and emotion management), and leadership (management of others, teamwork) skills.
3. In the modern world, a professional in any field must have soft skills to build a successful career and earn good money.
4. ‍Soft skills are useful at work and in your personal life.
5. To learn soft skills, you need to play team games – board games, sports, intellectual games, do projects together with classmates, participate in extracurricular activities, go to educational camps, and attend special courses.