** This paper is submitted by Dr. Richa Tewari, Asst. Professor, Dept. of Professional Communication, Pranveer Singh Institute of Technology, Kanpur – India.
Abstract
Ever-increasing global competition and the varying nature of most technical professions have made soft skills more than simply a prerequisite. To employers, technical professionals must not only master their technical disciplines, but also chip in as full participants in accomplishing the mission of the organization. In this paper, the ultimate significance of soft skills for technical professionals in the LPG (liberalization, privatization and globalization) era has been elicited. Remedial approaches to training as well as polishing soft skills have also been the focal point of the paper.
In many technical professions, the sheer focus of education and training is on technical topics related to a career or discipline. Students are generally engrossed to master various mathematics skills, science skills and technical skills directly related to the specific disciplines they are planning to enter. Though this learning is essential to their success yet the fast-paced and global marketplace of today is demanding more.
Technical professionals in various disciplines such as information technology, engineering, architecture, and research and development are required to broaden their hard skills to enslave soft skills. “Soft skills” is a sociological term relating to a person’s “EQ” (Emotional Intelligence Quotient), the cluster of personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that characterize relationships with other people. Soft skills complement hard skills, which are the occupational requirements of a job and many other activities.” (Wikipedia)
Basic interpersonal skills such as self-awareness, social awareness, relationship management, conflict management, diversity management, leadership and teamwork, empowering others, emotional intelligence, negotiation skills, change management and team problem solving are outstanding complements to soft skills. The more soft skills training can be incorporated directly into technical training programs, the more successful technical professionals will be in the increasingly challenging LPG era.
Introduction
With Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization (LPG) many multinational firms have set up their facilities in India, leading to employment opportunities at every level and change in the recruitment process as well. Until recently, there was a general opinion that technical knowledge and certification are the prerequisites for an ideal candidate for well-paying jobs in these multinational corporations. But this is not true any longer as there is an unquestionable paradigm shift in the demands of the corporate world. As Carole (2002) puts it, “More and more corporations around the world recognize that, in order to gain a competitive advantage, they also need to make sure their people know how to handle themselves at work and how to relate with their customers and peers”[1]. To achieve this magical transformation, soft skills are essential.
Soft Skills: Vital Demand of the LPG Era
Soft skills have enabled mankind to progress and become advanced societies. Highly specialized skills, advances in technology, amazing inventions, spectacular breakthroughs in arts and sciences have limited value unless one does not possess soft skills. Soft skills are very important not only for smooth running of a business enterprise but it are also equally, if not more, important for the success and growth of individual executives and professionals. In the age of globalization, soft skills are of paramount importance. The lack of proper soft skills creates barriers and distortion in communication which can have some very negative repercussions for any company or business set-up.
Proficiency in soft skills is a mandatory requirement for any professional working in a global business environment. Employers expect the workforce to possess excellent soft skills apart from knowledge and expertise in their respective technical field. In the present day workplace, individuals require a range of occupationally specific knowledge and skills, personal attributes and attitudes, the ability to transfer knowledge and skills to different situations, etc. Another core competency of employees which is the analytical skills or critical thinking is arising as a major concern among employers. Large scale surveys of soft skills reveal that the work force needs have to be constantly upgraded in terms of appropriate skills required. The leaders of industry have reiterated that in this changing milieu, they now seek potential candidates, i.e., graduates with sound technical knowledge as well as efficiency in soft skills. This can be achieved by giving the students adequate and appropriate training in soft skills, so that they are industry-ready and become productive from the day one.
Recruitment Scene in India
The phenomenal growth that the Indian economy has witnessed in the last decade was largely driven by the growth in the service sector and particularly fueled by industries such as IT Services, ITes, Retail, Hospitality, Travel, and Financial Services. This growth is now threatened because the effectiveness and growth of India’s talent pool has been seriously constrained due to a deepening soft skills crisis. As the employee base gets larger every year, the number of new hires required to sustain this growth rate has increased sharply, further exacerbating this situation.
Recruiting agencies always report that the number of “employable” engineering, technology, science, business and management graduates in India continues to be low. This, indeed, is a paradoxical situation. There is enormous and spectacular growth in well-paying job opportunities, a huge number of engineering and other graduates are produced every year, but there is a severe dearth of employable graduates. The globalization of the industries and the consequent spurt in the job scene has suddenly found us wanting in the area of soft skills; in fact, the economic boom is now threatened because the effectiveness and growth of India’s talent pool has been seriously constrained due to a deepening soft skills crisis.
Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills
A distinction is maintained between soft skills and hard skills. While hard skills refer to technical and academic skills, soft skills refer to wide-ranging personal and interpersonal skills. Academic and technical skills can be more easily defined, observed and measured. However, the measurement of personal and interpersonal skills requires complex factors. These are difficult to define, observe and measure and hence they are intangible. Such skills involve items such as inter-personal etiquette, netiquette (appropriate practices and use of expressions and content in Internet and e-mail communications, etc.), appropriate lexical choice, use of style, meaning and sentences, etc. These also include tone of friendliness, optimism, and various techniques of persuasion.
1. Hard Skills
Hard skills are technical skills. Like writing programs for computers, preparing a balance sheet, working on a particular machine for a particular process in a manufacturing workshop, acting in a television serial or a cinema film, carrying out a surgery etc. One must have proficiency in these skills in order to become a good professional in one’s chosen fields and to earn decent living. Hard skills are important and you should never undermine them. They are your bread and butter skills. Thus, hard skills are more rational types. Hard skills are academic skills, experience and level of expertise while soft skills are self-developed, interactive, communication, human and transferable skills. Literature suggests that hard skills contribute to only 15% of one’s success while remaining 85% is made by soft skills. These days most employers want to hire, retain and promote persons who are dependable, resourceful, ethical, and self-directed, having effective communication, willing to work and learn and having positive attitude. With the onset of economic liberalization, the Indian market is also becoming global, so the attributes of soft skills are to be imbibed by Indian youth to show their real potential at intra and international levels. Understanding the importance of this newly raised important aspect, most of the technical educational institutions in India have initiated programmes, projects and activities for developing soft skills in their students.
2. Soft Skills
Soft skills are behavioral in nature. For example, how do you communicate with the people, how good are you in making business presentations, how empathetic you are with the people you come across, can you work as a team member, do you manage your time well and so on. These skills make all the difference. Mere technical skills allow you certain degree of success. You can achieve higher degree of success if you equip yourself with soft skills. Technical skills are obvious and people learning them find it easy to understand and follow the processes of acquiring these skills. However, one wonders as to what is there to learn in soft skills; you are already doing them. Say, communication. You have been speaking and listening from the very young age and so, one may think as to what is there to learn more and how to learn. But if you look around, you may find that some people are more effective in speaking than others. Here is the answer. The people who speak more effectively have learnt and practiced to speak effectively. They have followed and implemented certain processes and guidelines for speaking more effectively. It did hot happen to them accidentally or automatically.
Soft skills make a difference in the external and internal personalities. People who acquire soft skills of high order are more sophisticated, more cultured, more reformed and are found to be more successful in every walk of life. Therefore, in addition to perfecting your hard skills, also try to perfect your soft skills. Thus, soft skills improve one’s emotional intelligence.
What an Employer Looks for in Technical Professionals
Effective communication and interpersonal skills are crucial to increase employment opportunities and to compete successfully in the business environment. The real key to the effectiveness of professionals is their ability to put their domain knowledge into effective practice. In this context, soft skills have a crucial role to play. If Technical Professionals know how to deal with people at the emotional level (peers, subordinates, superiors, clients, suppliers, etc.) through Emotional Intelligence (EI), they can build and sustain effective relationships that will result in mutual gain. Following are the traits which employers of LPG era search out in employees:
| Technical | Non- Technical |
| Technical expertise in the field | Teamwork skills |
| Analytical capabilities | Written and oral communication skills |
| Continuing knowledge growth | Presentation and selling skills |
| Placement and practical work experience | Understanding of finances |
| Design experience | Business and travel etiquette |
| Multidisciplinary experience | Managing without authority |
| Leadership with a global view |
Training Engineering & Technology Students for the Prevalent LPG Locale
LPG has a significant effect that is faced by graduates of all institutions and degree programs. The nature of this issue must be better understood to pursue an effective strategy for the curriculum development needed to prepare engineering graduates for a rapidly changing world. Recent trends in the offshore outsourcing of high technology jobs are introducing uncertainty about long term future of engineering employment.
LPG presents challenges and opportunities in the form of unstructured problems. This is very different from problems with “open ended” solutions which focus is on the end result and how it is achieved. In the case of unstructured problems, the solution again can be open-ended, but fundamentally the problem itself is not defined in terms of specifics [2].
The global markets and the concept of outsourcing parts of development to subject matter experts have created a change in the way students must prepare for a career in engineering. The students must understand the breakdown of various functional disciplines so they can decide where they best fit in. The students should strive to be as well rounded as possible. Students must continue to master the basic theory and fundamentals of engineering. Additional focus must be dedicated to engineering from a business perspective. In many developments, the toughest challenges are not at the implementation or design level, but more at the business level.
Many American companies have integrated product teams. Industry is interested in people who can do teamwork. The important thing is to know who the key players are. New employees must understand how to work with teams that are not of the same culture. This is due to companies merging. Engineering today requires more than knowing subject matter. It is critical to know how to work with people and learn from people [3].
Sharpening soft skills should address the development of attitudes and attributes as well as improvement in communication skills. This will, in turn, result in the ability to communicate thoughts and ideas effectively and interact with the right attitude.
Restructuring Curriculum of Budding Technical Professionals
The present curriculum is so designed that it does not include practical knowledge of all the four language skills, namely, reading, writing, listening and speaking. These skills should be learned along with soft skills. A change is required in designing the curriculum, which should be oriented more towards equipping the student to manage and excel at the work place.
To achieve optimum results the curriculum should be restructured to include some of the following areas:
1. Effective Communication Skills – verbal, written, identifying and removing barriers to communication, acquisition of different styles of communication.
2. Theme Presentation Skills – negotiation, structuring effective presentation, assertiveness.
3. Non-verbal Cues – kinesics (body language), paralinguistics (voice-dynamics), proxemics (use of space), and chronemics (use of time)
4. Dispositional/behavioral Attributes – workplace attitude, motivation, time and stress management, business and professional ethics, leadership and inter personal skills and team building.
5. Problem-solving Skills – creative, critical and analytical thinking, managing conflict, and decision making.
Maturing Students’ Soft Skills through University Life Activities
Most university students spend half of their student life living in residences in the university campus. As such, institutions of higher learning should use this golden opportunity to develop their soft skills. This can be done through carefully crafted programs and carrying them out in the favorable campus grounds. Moreover, it is university’s responsibility to prepare our budding graduates for the job market and to meet LPG challenges by reforming curriculum, developing courses of study in as many engineering and technical fields as possible to increase students’ understanding of global issues and cultural differences. This can also be done by offering courses to teach more communicative skills, introducing project-oriented curriculum rather than topic based, teaching students through technology in the classroom, recommending students take business and management courses as technical electives, including foreign language courses in the curriculum, providing opportunities for students to study abroad in their field of study, enabling students work together in teams, and giving workshops and seminars to explore global issues. This will expand their views on how students form other countries design and work solutions to real world problems.
Role of English Teachers in Institutes of Engineering and Technology
Teachers should react to the changing scenario and equip themselves to meet the need of the hour. Especially, the English teachers, at this crucial juncture, should play a vital role in bridging the gap between what is now available in the form of curriculum and the demands of the corporate world. As Cologne (2002) states, “we (English teachers) should try to do our best in achieving two results simultaneously that are vital in view of the ever-changing ‘face’ of English: to enhance our students’ linguistic competence; and to prepare them for handling the extra-linguistic demands via soft skills.” [4]
This transformation can be achieved by moving away from the traditional method of teaching language skills to the communicative method of language teaching. Instead of focusing on grammatical rules, syntactic structures, rote memorization of vocabulary and using literary texts as teaching material, the present-day English teachers need to concentrate on improving language efficiency and soft skills by making use of real life situations as teaching material. For this, a more creative, analytical, logic-oriented and interactive method of teaching should be adopted. In a nutshell, English teachers should become more of a facilitator, and less of an instructor. To excel in this new role English teachers should adopt changes in the following:
1. Amendment in Teaching Methodology
Before adopting any methodology, the teacher should assess the strengths and weaknesses of individual students. This type of Needs analysis will guide, both the teacher and student, to consolidate and enhance the strengths and concentrate on and reduce the weaknesses inherent in the students.
Subsequently, the teacher should explore and experiment various methods of teaching to address the different needs. It should be interactive and communicative, where students are given ample scope and opportunities to participate, interact and communicate, rather than lecture oriented. The bottom line is to make students practice, practice and more practice.
An Array of issues, problem solving topics, and varied situations which the students are likely to encounter in their work place can be manipulated appropriately in a class room.
This can be accomplished by conducting individual/pair/group task based activities like debates, group discussions, case analyses, role plays, business games and so on. Media and video shows can also be effectively used to improve listening comprehension, critical analysis and for presenting model.
The teaching methodology should be so devised as to include conceptualized tasks, and thus provide integration of skills-related learning experiences What ever be the method, the teacher should create the right ambience and make the class room very informal, interesting, and interactive. The methodology should also offer the teachers scope to observe, listen, evaluate and provide feedback.
2. Mixed-ability Classroom Management
An efficient teacher will manage properly the task-oriented classroom and facilitate higher-order thinking by concentrating on the following aspects:
- Appropriate Handling of Mixed-ability Classrooms
- Motivating Students for Active Participation
- Training Students about Time Management
- Conducting Task-enabled Interactive Sessions
We must remember that all our classes consist of mixed-ability population in most schools in India. Most often, then, in task-based interactive sessions, the teachers are confronted by mixed-ability classrooms, urging them to tread carefully as they need to match instructional approaches to the readiness, interests, learning speed/styles/attitudes, intelligence and communicative ability of all students. The activities should be completed within the given time.
3. Constructive Assessment of Students
The Assessment of the students involves the following:
- Interest/attitude & Assertiveness
- Active participation & Team spirit
- Leadership Skills & Problem-solving Competence
- Presentation & Business Communication Skills
- Interpersonal, Personal Effectiveness & Team Skills
- Managerial & Supervisory Skills
- Sales & Customer Service Skills
- Cross-Cultural Skills
- English Language Skills
Teachers must observe their performances individually or together. Assessment can be done objectively by analyzing and comparing the performances of students. Assessment and Evaluation of students can be summed up with teacher’s constructive solutions to the students’ problems.
Conclusion
With the changing educational trends, versatility in educational courses, availability of masses of qualified workforce, the competition for job acquisition and job sustainability is becoming tougher. To get an edge over the competitors, students are left with no choice but to add values to their hard skills with soft skills to exhibit their true potential in the global markets. To live to the challenge of globalization which is in line with the era of information economy, the strength of a nation is strongly dependent on the ability of its citizen to be highly intellectual and skillful. The development of human capital is thus important and necessary since it drives the nation to the envision vision and mission. Without a quality human capital, a nation will be weak as there is no human factor that is capable to embark on new initiatives and perspectives. A quality human resource comes from a quality education process. A carefully designed and well planned education system is critical to developing such human capital. Thus, institution of higher learning plays a very important role to produce a human capital that is highly knowledgeable and skillful to meet the demand and expectations of many people. The teaching and learning processes in institutions of higher learning should be capable to provide such knowledge and skills to future graduates.
To conclude, soft skills training is about enabling and empowerment. In specific, by curriculum modification, Engineering and Technology Institutes will need to streamline technical courses in the curriculum and provide more business and management courses so that students will have the business skills to be able to compete effectively in the LPG era.
References
Carole Nicolades “Focus on Soft Skills: A Leadership Wake-up Call”, http://www.businessknowhow.com/growth/softskills.htm, 2002.
Goeran Nieragden Cologne, “The Soft Skills of Business English”, The weekly column (www.eltnewsletter.com/back/September2000/art282000.htm), September 2000.
H. Holland Obiomon, A., Holland-Hunt, S., Holland, J., (2006). “The Importance of Incorporating Industry Experience in the Classroom”. Proceeding: 2006 ASEE Gulf- Southwest Annual Conference.
S. Usha Menon and C. Alamelu, Teaching the Intangibles –The Role of the English Teacher. Language in India: Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow. Volume 9 December 2009.
Williams S. Mossbrucker, J., Reyer, S., Petersen, W., (2005). “Preparing for Uncertainty-Addressing Globalization in an Engineering Curriculum”. Proceedings: 2005 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition.
This was an eye opener for me…I shall be highly benefited by this when I commence my soft skill sessions to students…