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I find students at my university have exceptional tech skills but do not understand the importance of soft skills. Even when grads come back and give talks and emphasize how important soft skills are, the current student attitude seems to be: yeah yeah whatever.

Any thoughts or suggestions on helping students see the importance of soft skills would be great.

Ralph

Erwin: 

Might the distinction between "technical" and "soft" skills be akin to the distinction between "hard" and "soft" systems?  Just as "Pigs is pigs" goes an old saying, systems is systems and skills is skills.  Clearly, technical and soft skills must be part of a larger set known simply as "skills."  What then is the distinction and where and how does it apply and prove useful?

Regards,

Fred Nickols

Managing Partner

Distance Consulting LLC

Home to The Knowledge Worker's Tool Room

www.nickols.us | fred@nickols.us

One starting point would be to list and define them.

Regards,

Fred Nickols

Managing Partner

Distance Consulting LLC

Home to The Knowledge Worker's Tool Room

www.nickols.us | fred@nickols.us

Our institution has defined "Essential Skills" and embedded them in all courses.

http://www.kwantlen.ca/essential_skills.html

and defined here: http://www.kwantlen.ca/learningcentres/resources.html

Looking Forward

Alice Macpherson, MA, PhD

PD & PLA Coordinator

The Centre for Academic Growth

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

http://kwantlen.ca/academicgrowth

604.599.3040

"We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference." - John Dewey (1906)

One starting point would be to list and define them.

Regards,

Fred Nickols

Managing Partner

Distance Consulting LLC

Home to The Knowledge Worker's Tool Room

www.nickols.us | fred@nickols.us

Alice,

The skills your institution have chosen sound much like the 21^st Century Skills:

http://p21.org/overview/skills-framework

There are links to documents that go into much more detail about the framework on that page. 

Unfortunately, neither the Kwantlen Essential Skills nor 21^st Century Skills address the issue that Ralph raised about increasing student desire to master these skills. 

Our institution has defined "Essential Skills" and embedded them in all courses.

http://www.kwantlen.ca/essential_skills.html

and defined here: http://www.kwantlen.ca/learningcentres/resources.html

Looking Forward

Alice Macpherson, MA, PhD

PD & PLA Coordinator

The Centre for Academic Growth

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

http://kwantlen.ca/academicgrowth

604.599.3040

"We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference." - John Dewey (1906)

One starting point would be to list and define them.

Regards,

Fred Nickols

Managing Partner

Distance Consulting LLC

Home to The Knowledge Worker's Tool Room

www.nickols.us | fred@nickols.us

Gary, et al,

Real desire to learn varies with the individual learner.

My institution's choice of making the skills explicit and embedding them in each course as appropriate is a way of surfacing their importance. I don't see a single solution, but rather a complex interplay of forces.

Faculty's role in contextualizing the learning and linking it to learner's own interests and desires is a key part of this equation.

Looking Forward

Alice Macpherson, MA, PhD

PD & PLA Coordinator

The Centre for Academic Growth

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

http://kwantlen.ca/academicgrowth

604.599.3040

"We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference." - John Dewey (1906)

Alice,

The skills your institution have chosen sound much like the 21^st Century Skills:

http://p21.org/overview/skills-framework

There are links to documents that go into much more detail about the framework on that page. 

Unfortunately, neither the Kwantlen Essential Skills nor 21^st Century Skills address the issue that Ralph raised about increasing student desire to master these skills. 

Our institution has defined "Essential Skills" and embedded them in all courses.

http://www.kwantlen.ca/essential_skills.html

and defined here: http://www.kwantlen.ca/learningcentres/resources.html

Looking Forward

Alice Macpherson, MA, PhD

PD & PLA Coordinator

The Centre for Academic Growth

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

http://kwantlen.ca/academicgrowth

604.599.3040

"We never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment. Whether we permit chance environments to do the work, or whether we design environments for the purpose makes a great difference." - John Dewey (1906)

One starting point would be to list and define them.

Regards,

Fred Nickols

Managing Partner

Distance Consulting LLC

Home to The Knowledge Worker's Tool Room

www.nickols.us | fred@nickols.us

All --

Alice makes some really great points, particularly with respect to the complexity of interplay of the various forces.

A couple of other to ponder:

   1.) It depends on whether the learners are "college students" with little real world experience or "adult learners" with significant real world experience. I would expect that Adult learners come to the table with a different set of expectations and as such on the continuum between pedagogy and an adrogogy, the teaching and learning styles and requirements would be skewed more towards androgogy.

    2.) With respect to defining what these soft skills are, it seems to me that there is a great deal of research that has been done over the last 25 years on the general of Emotional Intelligence. EI, by many measures has been shown to have a greater effect on an organization's effectiveness than IQ. While there are several tools for measuring EI, one of the things to keep in mind is that while change is possible, it is not something that happens overnight. Therefore, beginning early with education of EI allows those who want to make changes in how they apply their "soft skills" to their individual environments a head start.

cheers,

-rr

From: "Alice Macpherson" <Alice.Macpherson@KWANTLEN.CA>
To: MG-ED-DV@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2012 9:46:01 AM
Subject: Re: Decision guidelines, a shortcut to teaching soft skills

Colleagues,

I agree with Alice that each student comes with their own desires to learn, and that all any of us can do is create interesting and challenging coursework that includes these skills.  But I am not sure that the issue that Ralph raises is necessarily a "desire to learn" problem, but rather an issue of the perceived value of what is being learned.  Ralph indicates (and my experience is similar) that students have a desire to learn the technical stuff, but even when given good reasons to learn the soft skills they still aren't very eager.  Here are some of my cursory thoughts on this matter:

From my American Indian teachings, we all have four aspects to ourselves: spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental (interestingly enough, what Gallup is now calling "four energy centers").  The western business world tends to focus on two of these aspects; the mental (what we know) and the physical (what we can do).  They don't tend to look at the emotional (how excited someone might be to work for the organization) or the spiritual (how well one's values and beliefs align with the culture of the organization).  So we begin with an unbalanced approach at the outset.

In addition, those that tend to be most successful in western businesses are those that tend to focus on the mental aspect (technical skills) as opposed to the emotional aspect (soft skills).  For these "successful" managers, to deal with soft skills evokes "touchy-feely hoo-ha." Yet, as Rusty shared, we have a lot of research that demonstrates that a command of the emotional aspect not only helps a manager be better at their job, but also by having a higher number of emotionally engaged employees helps the organization be more successful. 

The challenge is to get those students who have a propensity to naturally lean more towards the mental aspect, rather than the emotional aspect, to value those skills that are not a part of their natural strengths.  We have to give them skills and tools that allow them to still play to their natural strengths and be who they are, but also utilize those skills that aren't a natural strength for them in an effective way.  Perhaps having a checklist, such as Irwin proposes, is a start, but I think it is only a start.  I believe that we will continue to have this challenge until we change our mindsets and embrace the whole person, and not just the two elements that western tradition has told us makes a successful organization.  That means that we must have a mind-shift which leads to a cultural change in both how we educate managers as well as how we operate organizations. 

When western businesses truly value soft skills equally as they do the hard skills (i.e., the whole person), then we'll probably see the student demonstrate more interest.  But when the business world still places their emphasis on hard skills, the challenge will still remain. 

I heartily look forward to others thoughts on this matter, and thanks to all who have already contributed to the discussion.