The Importance of soft skills

By Career Readiness Solution Team

In recent years, students, parents, and others are under the impression that the “hard skills” will lead to more job opportunities and successful careers. When we say “hard skills”, we’re referring to the STEM skills; Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Many are under the impression that these are the core skills that college students should be majoring in and focusing on in order to land themselves in a successful career.  However, recent studies and projects have demonstrated that this emphasis on the hard skills might not be as important as we originally thought.

Why Soft Skills Matter:

In very recent article written by Cathy N. Davidson, it is shown that soft skills may actually be more important than the hard skills. Both Google’s Project Oxygen and Project Aristotle revealed that even in a company that is STEM oriented by nature, these hard skills actually fall short when considering the important qualities of top employees and their best teams. In fact, Google found that their top 7 qualities were actually soft skills like communicating and listening, being a good coach, and having empathy. Taking it a step further, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) distributed a survey to both large and small companies, and results showed that communication skills land in the top three qualities that employers are actually looking for.

So, what does this all mean? It means that students, parents, and well, everyone in the job market shouldn’t shy away from highlighting or working to enhance their own soft skills.

In fact, recent trend reports show that employers and executives consider the soft skills to be extremely important for facilitating employee retention, improving leadership, and building a meaningful culture. Employers have shifted gears, and now are increasingly viewing soft skills as critical priorities for their selection of employees.

By now, many have realized that the hard skills will get your foot in the door, but its the soft skills that actually open those doors, and keep them open. Your hard skills will prove that you can do the work, but your soft skills are really what will make you shine as both a candidate and an employee.

At this point, you might be concerned about your own soft skills, and for some, you may even be worried that you don’t really have any soft skills at all…

How UCF is Improving Students’ Soft Skills:

Fortunately for everyone, soft skills are actually learnable!

Currently, University of Central Florida (UCF) is making strides to improve the soft skills of its students so that they are more marketable while they are job hunting. Through UCF’s Career Readiness Solution (CRS), undergraduate Psychology students participate in a handful of assessments designed to emulate the selection process, while also, measure the students’ soft skills.

The soft skills that are being measured are the eight competencies that NACE found to be the most important to have when entering the job market. These are measured through multiple assessments such as an in-box exercise that simulates a high fidelity job environment, a leaderless group discussion, a situational judgement test, and a few others. These exercises give the students the opportunity to learn what the selection process will be like while being in an environment where it is safe to practice.

At the end of the semester, the students receive individual feedback on their strengths and areas of improvement with these eight soft skills, and they are also given specific suggestions on how to improve on these soft skills before entering the workforce. With the implementation of CRS, it is that goal that students graduating from college not only have the hard skills they learned from their courses, but also the soft skills necessary to be successful in the working world.

In short, it’s well worth it to learn to use your soft skills to complement your hard skills. In the job market and in the business world, it turns out it really isn’t so bad to be a little soft around the edges!

References: Washington Post | Forbes | Mindtools

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