Жұмысқа қабілеттілікті арттыратын дағдылар

Combination of skills that enable people to navigate their environment

Soft skills, also known as power skills, common skills, essential skills, or core skills, are psychosocial skills generally applicable to all professions. These include critical thinking, problem solving, public speaking, professional writing, teamwork, digital literacy, leadership, professional attitude, work ethic, career management and intercultural fluency. This is in contrast to hard skills, which are specific to individual professions. The word "skill" highlights the practical function. The term alone has a broad meaning, and describes a particular ability to complete tasks ranging from easier ones like learning how to kick a ball In this specific instance, the word "skill" has to be interpreted as the ability to master hardly controlled actions.

. The term "soft skills" was created by the U. S. Army in the late 1960s. It refers to any skill that does not employ the use of machinery. The military realized that many important activities were included within this category, and in fact, the social skills necessary to lead groups, motivate soldiers, and win wars were encompassed by skills they had not yet catalogued or fully studied. Since 1959, the U. S. Army has been investing a considerable amount of resources into technology based development of training procedures. In 1968 the U. S. Army officially introduced a training doctrine known as "Systems Engineering of Training" covered in the document CON Reg 35
100 1. PG Whitmore cited the CON Reg 350 100 1 definition: "job related skills involving actions affecting primarily people and paper, e. g., inspecting troops, supervising office personnel, conducting studies, preparing maintenance reports, preparing efficiency reports, designing bridge structures." In 1972, a US Army training manual began the formal usage of the term "soft skills". At the 1972 CONARC Soft Skills Conference, Dr. Whitmore presented a report aimed at figuring out how the term "soft skills" is understood in various CONARC schools. After designing and processing a questionnaire, experts formulated a new tentative definition: "Soft skills are important job related skills that involve little or no interaction with machines and whose application on the job is quite generalized." Soft skills make people flexible in a world which keeps changing. Interest in soft skills has increased over the years. The more research that is conducted, the more people understand the relevance of this concept. The huge amount of fund companies and worldwide organizations are investing in the training and development of this field shows this interest. The European Commission launched the program Agenda for new skills and jobs in 2012 in order to train and explain to young adults this new set of skills. The Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman claims that “soft skills predict success in life, that they casually produce that success, and that programs that enhance soft skills have an important place in an effective portfolio of public policies”.

“Hard skills include technical or administrative competence”. Soft skills are commonly used to “refer to the “emotional side” of human beings in opposition to the IQ (Intelligence Quotient) component related to hard skills". Hard skills still represent a fundamental aspect, but soft skills equaled them for importance. According to the leadership professor Robert Lavasseur, most of the researchers he interviewed in this field  “rated soft skills higher than technical skills”. Research shows the effect of poorer soft skills on life outcomes, and how improving these can fill skills gaps or increase individuals' own life circumstances.

Studies by the OECD in 2015 suggested soft skills can be meaningfully measured within cultural and linguistic boundaries. Such measures include a combination of methods that include self reported personality, behavioural surveys and objective psychological assessments. These measurements can be improved by collecting data from multiple sources across learning contexts such as the school environment, family context and the wider community and triangulating the data (OECD, 2015). This is because surveys can be subject to bias and having multiple sources such as self, teacher, peer and parental reporting can provide unique perspectives on student's skills as well as infer latent personality (John and De Fruyt, 2014). In addition, anchoring vignettes is another a method that can be implemented to lessen biases and increase data quality as well as improve cross cultural comparability of soft skill assessments (King, Murray, Salomon, and Tandon, 2003; Kyllonen and Bertling, 2014). Frameworks have been developed to measure and progress in essential soft skills, such as the Universal Framework for Essential Skills.

Because of their rising importance, the need to teach soft skills has become a major concern for educators and employers all over the world. Because soft skills are poorly defined, teaching them is more challenging, compared to classical skills. For this reason, the first step consists of understanding how to evaluate them, so that educators can track student progress. As for teaching, evaluating soft skills is harder than technical skills. “Quizzes or exams cannot accurately measure interpersonal and leadership skills”. Group projects seem to be a good way to develop soft skills, but evaluating them still represents a hard obstacle. Researchers consider peer evaluation a good compromise between working in groups and an objective evaluation. The researches conducted on this topic reported both positive and negative results. is another reason why the education of soft skills is hard. “Prior research and anecdotal evidence has emphasized that soft skills training is significantly less likely to transfer from training to job than hard skills training”. Research has been conducted investigating the transfer of soft skills and knowledge through formats such as play (DeKorver, Choi and Town, 2017) as well as project based learning (Lee and Tsai, 2004). Another key finding from the literature is that in order to maximize benefits of soft skills over the long term, they should be focused on young children particularly from the age of 1 – 9 years old. Nobel prize winners Heckman and Kautz (2012) provided evidence of this in their analysis of the Perry Preschool Soft Skills program, where they found how personality traits can be changed in ways that produce beneficial life outcomes. The program involved teaching social skills to 3 and 4 year old children from low income black families with initial IQ scores below 85 at age 3. 128 children participated in the four year high quality preschool education program which emphasized active learning. The children were involved in activities designed to develop their decision making and problem solving skills and that were planned, executed and reviewed by the children themselves with support from adults. Teachers also paid weekly 1.5 hour visits to each student's home to involve the mother in the educational process and help implement the preschool curriculum at home. This longitudinal study was evaluated using randomized controlled trials (RCT). It was found that the group which experienced the enrichment preschool program compared to the control group which didn't participate had significantly more positive life outcomes than their peers by the age of 40. This included that 60% of the program group earned more per year (over US$20,000) as compared to the 40% that the non program group. In addition, 77% of the program group graduated high school whereas only 60% of the non program group graduated. Other life outcomes included program school participants were less likely to get arrested, owned their own home and car and had fewer teenage pregnancies (Heckman and Kautz, 2012) and Project PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) that teaches self control, emotional awareness and social problem skills aimed at elementary school children (Bierman et al., 2010). Both studies have found implementing soft skills education to small groups of children at a young age have led to significantly higher wages in early adulthood compared to their peers and other lifetime successes (Dee and West, 2011; Durlak et al., 2011). IBM SkillsBuild has soft skills training courses.

The same OECD report emphasized the importance of metacognitive skills for lifelong learning. Metacognition amounts to thinking about one's thinking. More specifically, it refers to the processes used to assess one's understanding. It includes critical thinking, reflection, and awareness of oneself as a thinker and a learner (Chick, 2013). With increasing automation, purely cognitive or professional skills no longer suffice to navigate this VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) (Yeo, 2019, OECD 2015.). That said, humans sometimes fail to adapt productively, and machines, in many cases, lack those capacities entirely (Laukkonen, Biddell and Gallagher, 2018).

While "soft skills" have become increasingly taught in educational programs worldwide, some scholars have shown the inconsistent usage of the term, as well as the ways it is used to control, rather than empower, employees. Deborah Cameron, for example, shows that the growing focus on "communication" skills among service providers in the UK has limited workers' forms of expression and produced uniform conversational codes. Kori Allan demonstrates that state run integration programs for new immigrants in Canada, employ the focus on soft skills so that individuals adopt the interpersonal cultural norms of Canadian society. In China, the Ministry of Education has sought to promote students' self expression and communicational skills at the expense of exam driven learning, yet the difficulty in measuring these abilities, and moreover the fact that these abilities are more easily identified among the urban elite rather than democratically accessible, has curtailed much of these efforts. As Gil Hizi shows, rather than being treated as objectively recognized abilities necessary for the job market, people in China who foster soft skills regard themselves as becoming more individualistic and cosmopolitan in contrast to the demands of their local culture.