The importance of soft skills: Education beyond academic ...

1 146 NAWA Journal of Language and Communication, June 2008 The importance of Soft skills : Education beyond academic knowledgeBernd SchulzPolytechnic of NamibiaAbstractThis paper makes a survey of the importance of soft skills in students lives both at college and after college. It discusses how soft skills complement hard skills , which are the technical requirements of a job the student is trained to do. The paper exhorts educators to take special responsibility regarding soft skills , because during students university time, educators have major influence on the development of their students soft skills .

2 Embedding the training of soft skills into hard skills courses is a very effective and efficient method of achieving both an attractive way of teaching a particular content and an enhancement of soft skills . Soft skills fulfil an important role in shaping an individual s personality. It is of high importance for every student to acquire adequate skills beyond academic or technical knowledge. IntroductionFor decades employers as well as educators frequently complain about a lack in soft skills among graduates from tertiary Education institutions.

3 Predominantly missed are communication skills , but additional knowledge in business or project management is also ranking highly on the list of missing skills desirable for graduates entering the business world. This problem is in no way restricted to developing nations like Namibia; it is also well known to industrial countries around the world. A recent outcry in this regard came from the British Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR), which recently reported that Employers say many graduates lack soft skills , such as team working and They go on to explain that candidates are normally academically proficient but lacking in soft skills such as communication as well as verbal and numerical reasoning.

4 (AGR, 2007) Already more than 40 years ago the German Engineering Association (VDI) recommended that 20% of courses of the engineering curricula should be soft skills . Engineering graduates should bring along knowledge of foreign languages, cultural awareness, should be team workers, and should perhaps have attended a Rhetoric course (Ihsen, 2003). And indeed, the situation seems to be particularly bad in science and engineering programmes. Comparing the levels of soft skills between a fictitious graduate of Mechanical Engineering and a graduate of History of Arts, both freshly coming from university, the German Professor Dietrich Schwanitz rated the mechanical engineer at the level of a caveman (Schwanitz, 1999:482).

5 Obvious Bernd Schulz is a Senior Lecturer at the Polytechnic of Namibia, holding a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany. He is currently engaged in research for his thesis at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany. After 16 years in industry, working in Germany as well as in Asian and African countries, he joined the Polytechnic of Namibia in 2000 where he teaches Information Technology up to graduate level. Being confronted with the enormous learning problems that most IT students experience during their first year at the Polytechnic, Mr Schulz developed a keen interest in improving teaching methodologies and in the training of soft skills .

6 E-mail: Journal of Language and Communication, June 2008 reasons are that non-scientific academic programmes in general put more emphasise onto soft skills , or they are themselves by nature very soft skill related. The English scientist and novelist Snow basically established this fact in his acclaimed speech titled The Two Cultures , in which he defined but at the same time regretted the separation of liberal Education into a philosophical-humanistic hemisphere and a technical-scientific hemisphere, where the former is perceived as superior (Snow, 1968).

7 What are soft skills ?Before going any further in debating the importance of soft skills we have to clarify the question What exactly are soft skills ? This basic question is not easy to answer, because the perception of what is a soft skill differs from context to context. A subject may be considered a soft skill in one particular area, and may be considered a hard skill in another. On top of it the understanding of what should be recognised as a soft skill varies widely. Knowledge in project management for instance is nice to have for an electrical engineer, but it is a must to have for a civil engineer.

8 Training in cultural awareness might be useful for a chemist, but it is an absolute necessity for public or human resources management in societies of diverse cultures. Interesting enough the internationally renowned encyclopaedias have little to say about soft skills . The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia gives a very broad definition of soft skills , which leaves much room for discussion: 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.

9 Soft skills complement hard skills , which are the technical requirements of a job. (Wikipedia, 2007) Table 1: Examples of soft skills Communication skills Critical and structured thinking Problem solving skills Creativity Teamwork capability Negotiating skills Self-management Time management Conflict management Cultural awareness Common knowledge Responsibility Etiquette and good manners Courtesy Self-esteem Sociability Integrity / Honesty Empathy Work ethic Project management Business managementTable 1 offers a list of examples of soft skills based on the Wikipedia definition.

10 The list is by far not complete. For instance under personal traits characteristics like imagination, curiosity, determination, passion, or persistence could be added. In January 2007 the career management consultant Challa Ram Phani published an article under the headline The top 60 soft skills at work , listing and discussing those 60 skills which according to his study are the personal traits and skills that employers state are the most important when selecting employees for jobs of any 148 NAWA Journal of Language and Communication, June 2008 type (Phani, 2007)