In this post, Ventures author Donna Price looks at the essential ‘soft skills’ expected by employers, and suggests strategies for how these skills can be integrated in the classroom to prepare students for the 21st century workplace.
What are ‘soft skills’?
Soft skills (also called people skills, transferable skills, and employability skills) are general skills necessary for success at all employment levels and in all sectors of the labor market. SCANS and the Framework for 21st Century Learning identify skills necessary to be successful in today’s workplace. There is renewed interest in integrating workplace readiness skills in education as a result of recent US legislation — the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) — as well as the College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) for Adult Education.
A 2013 report from the Seattle Jobs Initiative indicates that 75% of businesses surveyed reported that soft skills were as important or more important than technical skills in securing entry-level employment. The 2013 Job Outlook report says that employers want good communicators who can make decisions and solve problems while working effectively as part of a team.
What are some of these soft skills employers refer to? In Are they really ready to work?, a consortium of 4 corporations asked over 400 employers across the US: “What skills are necessary for success in the workplace of the 21st century?”. The essential soft skills cited by these employers are ones that are echoed by employers across the US:
- professionalism/work ethic
- oral and written communication
- critical thinking/problem solving
What can we do in our classes to integrate some of these essential soft skills? Here are some strategies I’ve used in my classes to develop the soft skills that employers have stated future employees should have to be successful and thrive on the job.
Skill #1: Professionalism/work ethic
These skills include timeliness, dress, courtesy, teamwork, commitment, responsibility, and integrity.
- Provide checklists so that students monitor their own progress by keeping track of their test scores. This encourages responsibility. When students are given an opportunity to keep track of their progress, they are more motivated and committed to coming to class.
- Conclude every lesson by calling attention to the relevance of the lesson and the classroom activities to students’ lives. At the end of class for two to three minutes, focus students’ attention on what they have learned that day and how what they learned will transfer to their lives. Students will come back to class if they see that what they are learning will help them achieve their goals.
- Provide opportunities for students to cooperate, collaborate, and work in teams. One activity that encourages teamwork is having students interview each other and make a bar graph of the results. It’s important for students to be able to tell potential employers that they can work in a team with people from other countries and get along with each other.
Skill #2: Oral communication
Give students the opportunity to communicate orally. This is one of the soft skills that is most commonly cited by employers. Even at the beginning level, students can practice communicating orally.
- Have students talk to different classmates to acquire information in order to fill out a chart.
- Have students work together to practice the new vocabulary from a unit.
- Use conversation cards. Students are given conversation cards and they mingle with each other to get answers from their classmates. Students are encouraged not to show their cards to their classmates, which forces them to listen to each other rather than read.
- Teach and have students practice useful language functions. For example, after a short conversation, have students use phrases for leave taking, such as, “It was nice talking to you,” “Thank you for your time,” or “Let’s talk more later.”
Skill #3: Written communication
- Give students opportunities to write in different genres, such as e-mails, letters, paragraphs, and summaries.
- Encourage peer revision whenever possible in writing.
- Teach useful phrases for giving advice or suggestions in writing, for example, “I think you should…” “Why don’t you…,” “If I were you, I’d…”.
Skill #4: Critical thinking
According to Parrish and Johnson in Promoting Learner Transitions to Postsecondary Education and Work: Developing Academic Readiness Skills from the Beginning, critical thinking includes the following skills: organizing, categorizing, predicting, interpreting, analyzing and evaluating, summarizing, and decision making.
What can we do in our classes to promote critical thinking without changing what we teach? Teachers can model organizational skills by starting each class with an agenda on the board. Writing a basic agenda or schedule of what is going to be done in class is a simple thing that has very positive results. To write an agenda, the teacher must be organized, with goals and outcomes in mind. Students see as soon as they walk in that their teacher has a plan. They see what they are going to learn that day.
Encourage students to come to class every day with a binder and teach them how to organize learning materials. If a student is asked at a job interview, “Why should I hire you?” or “What can you offer us that the other 40 applicants can’t?” our students will be ready for the answer: “I’m organized. I’m efficient. I can find what I need quickly.”
Skill #5: Problem solving
- Use illustrations that show a problem to provide students with problem solving activities. A problem solving template can be used for students to write the problem, discuss solutions and consequences, and then negotiate and make a group decision on the best solution. The template keeps students on task.
- Have a “Problem Box” for students to write (anonymously) about a problem they are having at school or at work. The teacher reads the problem out loud, puts students in groups with the template, and the class helps the student solve the problem.
The technical (hard) skills students learn are continually evolving. However, the essential soft skills students need remain constant. Regardless of their career path, they must learn to be good communicators, effective team players, and creative problem solvers. They need to know how to lead, bounce back when things go wrong, and be accountable and dependable employees. These interpersonal and self-management skills will help them flourish and grow at work.
Let’s give our students an advantage over the competition by providing opportunities in our classes to develop their soft skills. Leave us a comment below letting us know what you are doing in your class to integrate soft skills.
Watch Donna Price talk more about the College and Career Readiness Standards with Ventures co-author Gretchen Bitterlin.