Post added by Aleksov Borcho
Whenever I have attended any debate among employers, educational authorities and institutions, related to qualifications, almost always employers stress the soft skills and complain that graduated students lack them. Nowadays, we can read many related articles too: “57% of senior leaders today say soft skills are more important than hard skills”. “Strengthening a soft skill is one of the best investments you can make in your career, as they never go out of style. Plus, the rise of artificial intelligence is only making soft skills increasingly important, as they are precisely the type of skills robots can’t automate”, often can be heard by providers who advertise their courses.
On the other hand, it seems that educational institutions, despite all these repetitive complains, don’t care too much about it. Very often, according them, more or less, that is not their job. Also, very likely they claim, soft skills are not among their primary mission and goal and that the soft skills should be gained through internship or work and so on. What could be the reason for such attitudes or better say such negligence? Are they incapable or not interested to deliver them? Are they not able to recognize that actually they provide them? Can we justify dividing of the skills on soft and hard ones?
Let us consider the skill “sampling” for instance. Any chemist is taught and trained for it, often, within the Analytical Chemistry courses, by the Educational Institutions on different level.
Among the most wanted soft skills that the companies stress out belong:
1. Creativity;
2. Persuasion;
3. Collaboration;
4. Adaptability;
5. Time Management.
Can the chemist perform onside sampling without any of them!? Let us now discover, within the sampling, all wanted skills listed by the companies. Depending of the sample, is it about soil, drinking water, waste water, air etc, the chemist should use a different equipment and different sampling method. Depending of compounds to be analysed, the sample should be stored in different kind of vessel: glass, plastic, metal . . . and eventually preserved and conserved in a different way. Depending on the purpose and the consequences, the chemist should pay attention and for the amount of the sample and eventually keep a part for court purposes. Besides all that, still the chemist, and eventually along with his team, should arrive onside and return to the lab without damaging the taken samples. Onside, maybe he should negotiate with locals or company about sampling plans and likely face with different terrain configuration and weather conditions. We must not forget that the chemist should probably need to take notes and write a report for the sampling and for sure obey all requested quality assurance procedure and protect himself properly. It is very unlikely that the chemist could perform even a simple sampling without all above listed soft skills. We can also recognize and discover them in every step during educational process. It is almost impossible that the Educational Institutions can predict where the chemist would be employed. Their role is to equip the chemist with knowledge, skills and competences for effective sampling, among others, as they declare. Same soft skills are applicable not only when it is about sampling but also when it is related to the other hard skills such as: applying different testing analytical methods; recognizing and dealing with interferences; calculation; validation of an analytical method; supplying, use and storage of the chemicals; calibrations of the equipment and many others. Sampling is just one and the first step until the chemist reports the amount of a compound that he is asked for and that the others can use that data. It is completely unlikely that the employer would employ the chemist only for sampling.
On the other hand, who can guarantee if our chemist takes separate and isolated general courses for “creativity”, “collaboration”, “adaptability”, “time management” or whatever else, that they might serve him and be properly implemented for sampling purposes, as in our case? Also, there are plenty of articles, presentations and debating “soft skills issue” and many attempts and recipes for delivering and assess them during educational process but still employers are not satisfied enough again and continue with their complaining. It is not unusual, when you search, to find so many articles and efforts that are trying to enforce the soft skills among the students. Still, it seems that they are not successful in a measure that will satisfy the employers because they keep remarking that the students lack proper and useful soft skills.
Perhaps, exactly that constant insisting that everything could be digitalized and performed by robots, decreases the attention for gaining soft skills while one acquires hard skills. This of course doesn’t mean that the artificial intelligence should be stopped on behalf of soft skills but for sure it can’t be an excuse that the hard skills are outdated, should be less or to behave more relaxed in gaining them.
There is no doubt, employers insist and want soft skills and they need to be delivered. There are significant differences in the expectations and perceptions of employers and the perceptions of educators and graduates regarding the level of soft skills graduates possess. The easiest way for Educational Institution, facing this challenge, is to recognize and deliver them within the hard skills.
More research is needed to systematically assess empirically the ways in which soft skills can be defined, developed and evaluated. When it is about the learning outcome in our case, it seems it should be expressed with: “able for sampling different matrix” or maybe it would not be mentioned at all but rather hidden in the learning outcome:” able for analysing organic and inorganic compounds in different matrix by using proper analytical method” where “sampling” would be implied. If we start going deeper in developing this learning outcome and detail it through learning outcomes on level of subject or activity in front of us will appear all hidden soft skills, provided or needed ones. They should be identified within other subjects or activities too. Once we discover and crosscheck them everywhere we can also find ways how they should be delivered to serve their purpose and be transversal. Soft skills should be thought of as part of cradle-to-grave learning, insofar as they need to be developed at every stage of curricula and beyond. Clearer and more consistent measurements of soft skills need to be established, as well as benchmarks at each level.
Hard skills are valuable source for soft skills and actually they are able to make them transversal, their real value. Soft skills are within hard skills and we just need to enlighten them by developing a new skill: “discovering soft among hard skills”.
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