Abstract
Soft skills include emotional/social/multiple intelligences and have come to be key skills for students at the tertiary level as many of them join jobs on completion of their degree. So it is mandatory to look at ways of making them master these skills with a wonderful learning experience. Soft skills is a compulsory subject in the college curriculum at Chennai , so this paper delve into this topic to highlight its importance in today’s world. It also suggests some activities that can make the teaching of soft skills more interesting and practical so that they take these skills further to their job and home fronts. This paper also discusses how a poem could be used to integrate soft skills at the tertiary level.
Introduction
With today’s globalization and internet explosion, you can work from any corner of the world provided, you have the expertise and the needed soft skills. To cater to this growing need for soft skills, the undergraduate and post graduate colleges affiliated to the Madras University have soft skills as a compulsory subject.Earlier, the need for soft skills was not so much felt as the job market did not feel its neccesity. But with changing times,employers are looking for employees who have a balance of both hard and soft skills.Soft skills are necessary not only to get a job ,but also to keep it. Further, if you have soft skills , you can sail through life smoothly as you know how to manage yourself well and manage others better. This paper looks into this topic and explores ways to makes this subject more interesting to the student community.
Soft Skills : Facts and Factuals
- Soft skills can be looked as a combination of personality traits ,elegance, skill to use the language effectively in oral and written communication , and good attitude that makes people different from the others.
- According to (Belzer,2004) soft skills is described as an art in the corporate sector as it is to do with managing oneself and the people at work so as to ultimately attain maximum customer satisfaction at the end of the day.
- Soft skills complement hard skills ,which are technical requirements of a job. (en.wikipedia.org)
- Though large number of graduates ,post graduates and engineering students pass out of colleges every year, but only 10% are employable and the rest are unsuitable as they lack soft skills (The Hindu, 18.7.2006).
- According to Verma(2012), effective soft skills reduce stress and conflict, improve reelation building ability, enhance intimacy , increase understanding , and promote joy. These skills consist of communication skills, assertive skills, conflict resolution and anger management. By this we could estimate how important sof t skills are for better living.
- Verma(2012) equates soft skills as a combination of IQ (Intelligent Quotient) plus EQ( Emotional Quotient). One needs to work today using both the mind and heart. According to Daniel Goleman( 1996) EQ matters more than IQ.This makes it clear that eventhough a balance need not be drawn between the hard and soft skills, soft skills need to take a upper hand as it deals with how you say and do things than what you know , do or say.
- Soft skills have a lot to do with interpersonal skills ( one’s skills while dealing with others) and intrapersonal skills(one’s skills while dealing with oneself). So if students are fine tuned to these skills at the college level they could manage life and their jobs in a better manner.
- Soft skills have lot to do with non-verbal behaviour. According to Latha(2009),body language is an essential soft skills that speaks loader than words. It occupies 73% of the communication and only 7% is taken up by actual words. So grooming students to focus on non-verbal behaviour is an important prerequisite for success.
- According to Shipurkar(2009) , Soft skills can be integrated into the college curriculum by way of the add-on model, integrated model or composite model .So a novel way of integrating soft skills with the subjects that students learn can help them imbibe skills for life.
- Soft skills is doing the same things that others do in a novel way in order to get positve result.This requires perseverance, self knowledge and the knowledge about how others behave and act.
Suggested Activities to Imbibe Soft Skills
As students need to imbibe soft skills during the course of their study, a variety of activities need to be given right from the beginning of the academic year. Some of them are suggested below.
- National and International Seminars on soft skills: This can bring great experts in soft skills to the portals of the colleges.Their valuable talks ,interactions and workshops could be an inspiration to many students who do not have much knowledge about soft skills.
- Interaction with the Human Resource Department : Students can be taken to standard companies so that they get a feel of an office atmosphere. In groups they could have a discussion with Head of the HR department on what employers look for in employees.This hands on experience could help students mould themselves to the needs of the company.
- Group Discussions: GD must be a constant activity in the soft skills classes where in students discuss a case study and cull out the soft skills that formed the core of that case study. With constant discussions of this sort, students can be made to understand the flaws of characters in real life situations.
- Project Work: Projects must go hand in hand with classroom teaching of soft skills. Project work would get a better insight of the soft skills , as students go further to understand that particular soft skills.
- Soft Skills and Daily Living: Soft skills must be made a part and parcel of one’s daily living. Lecturers need to be role models and they need to insist that students practice soft skills at home and in college. For instance: Time management must be followed from the time one wakes up till he/she retires to bed. Similarly, stress management. Students must be made to identify the causes of stress, how to handle it and learn from that experience.
- Maintaining a Portfolio on SWOT : Students must be made to write the strength, weakness, opportunities and threats(SWOT) they face on a daily basis to see how they were able to turn the threats and weakness in their favour. This daily exercise could help them understand themselves and others as well.
- Improving Communication: It has been observed that students at the tertiary level have hardly any scope to improve their communication skills .Few colleges have language labs without the necessary infrastructure. Presentations , group discussions, should be a part and parcel of the teaching-learning process.
- Newpaper Reading: Lot of soft skills can be imbibed by reading the daily newspapers. There should a separate notice board where students can put up materials on soft skills that they come across in the paper. Students must be made to cull out soft skills from news items and discuss them in class. They must be made to think creatively and critically on an issue rather than reading the paper meaninglessly.
- Dress Code and Etiquette: Viewing the way students dress to college, all colleges must adhere to strict dress code that match the job market. This would give them a sense of dressing and etiquette which is very much required in the corporate world.
- Integrating Soft Skills into the Lesson:Soft skills and multiple intelligence(Gardener,1983) modules can be taught through the lessons. In this way, students can not only learn the lesson effectively ,but alsoimbibe valuable soft skills effortlessly.
A Study : Teaching Soft Skills Through Literature
Here is a lesson plan to integrate soft skills through a poem which can be tried out in the literature classrooms.
Poem : Tiger by William Blake
Objectives:
- To teach the poem Tiger and the figures of speech ingrained in the poem
- To make students imbibe soft skills through the poem , ‘Tiger.’
- To engage them in activities beyond the text so that their multiple intelligences are tapped in the learning process.
Soft Skills in Focus : Adabtability, Being on the Job till it is done, Team Skills
The Way It Can Be Done:
At first,the students must be made to read the poem ‘Tiger’. Then they could discuss what they comprehended from their first reading. Further, they could be given the inventory of soft skills so that they tick the soft skills that can imbibe from the poem. Further more,the poem should be explained and the figures of speech needs to be discussed in detail. After the comprehension of the text, they must be made to do the exercises that have modules of listening, speaking , reading and writing. The exercises also contain a soft skills module on adaptability. Students must read the text and get to know for themselves the adaptable features of the tigers when they are in the wild. This could help students correlate the need for adaptability in real life situations. Finally, the multiple intelligence module would make students work individually to represent the theme ‘Tigers’ or ‘ Adapatablity’ in as many ways as possible. They for instance collected information from the net or library, drew, painted, narrated, brought paper cuttings, to the class. This acitivity did highlight how multiple intelligence worked in a classroom.
Feedback
Feedback forms are distributed so as to know the effectiveness of this technique and see what improvisation could be made for enhancing soft skills in a better way.It also helps the researcher to know if the students have imbibed soft skills through this poem. It will give an idea as to how effectively lessons could be planned to teach soft skills in a novel way.
Observation
Classroom observation gives an insight as to how actively students participate in each activity and and the efforts they take to understand the content and the language as well. Informal discussion with students and the subject teacher can give further insight into this technique. It is seen that one lesson can teach a multiple soft skills and that is an added advantage in this technique.
Suggestions
It is observed that if students lack good communication skills to express their thoughts and feelings. Efforts need to be taken to improve their communication . Besides, teaching soft skills through the subject need to be seriously considered for the benefit of the students at large.
Conclusion
Considering the global market and the high competition for jobs, students must be empowered with soft skills ,emotional/social/multiple intelligences before they leave the portals of the colleges. This will help them face the challenges before them both at the workfront and at home . For this teachers need to think creatively and beyond the lecture method. Teaching of soft skills are still at the theoritical level in most colleges. There should be a paradigm shift in teaching these people’s skills so that students value these skills more than the certificate they get on passing their degrees.
References
Belzer ,K.(2004).Project management: Still more art than science.www.in.kpmg.com/pressrelease
Goleman,D.( 1996), Emotional Intelligence Why it Matters More than IQ.,London: Bloomsbury
Gardener,H.(1983).Frames of Mind.New York: Basic Books.
Lata Pushp (2009).Soft skills for Enhancing Visibility of the New Recruits. In Soft Skills : Corner stone of Professional Success. New Delhi: Jain Brothers.
Shipurkar Rekha (2009) Equipping Indian Graduates with Soft Skills: A Trainer’s Perspective.IIn Soft Skills : Corner stone of Professional Success. New Delhi: Jain Brothers.
Verma, Shalini.(2012),Enhancing Emplpyability@Soft Skills,New Delhi: Pearson.
About the author
Ms. B Shoba Rao had been an English teacher for twenty years (1987-2007) and had taught students at the primary and high school level in Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh), Kaiga (Uttar Karnataka) and Kalpakkam (Tamil Nadu), India. Currently, she writes materials related to education and assists in publishing English text books and workbooks at the school and college level in the city of Chennai (Tamil Nadu), India. She has also published a book Soft Skills for Positive Traits to help students learn employability skills. She is now pursuing her PhD at the University of Madras in the area of English Language Teaching (ELT). Her interests are soft skills and literature.