Page 18 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

Project Name: Manual for Soft Skills
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6 | Chapter 1 ACE Pro India Pvt. Ltd.

Soft skills are very important to students for various reasons. Some of
them are outlined below:

• To handle interpersonal relations,
• To choose career and make appropriate decisions,
• To communicate effectively.

An investment in student’s soft skills ultimately affects the bottom line by
building new knowledge in the student. Relationships play a vital role in
human life. In today’s fast-paced and continually changing technology, hard
skills are continuously in need for being updated. A student who has inter-
personal problem and another who has difficulty in making a choice about
his career suffers from lack of soft skills. Hence, the need is for a continuous
renewal of soft skills in terms of teaching and training the students. This will
facilitate their potential towards being effective and successful.
According to Daniel Coleman, emotional intelligence, or EQ—referring
to a combination of competencies that contribute to a person’s ability to man-
age himself or herself and relate to other people—matters twice as much as
IQ or technical skills in job success. Not only does it create happier and more
successful employees, according to Coleman, it also helps create more suc-
cessful companies. The results of one study on the opinion of the importance
of soft skills indicated that the single most important soft skill for a candidate
in a job interview to possess was interpersonal skills. This was followed by
written or verbal communication skills and the ability to work under pres-
sure. Technical skills and knowledge were found to be at the bottom of the
list. It is interesting to note that another larger survey done in the US in 1998
indicates that more than two- thirds (68 per cent) interviewed, rated soft
skills as very important compared to less than half (46 per cent) rating soft
skills as very important in 1996. It is clear then that there are forces at play,
which are changing the face of the working environment and leading to an
increased emphasis on the deployment of soft skills at all levels of the man-
agement, irrespective of any organization.

THE LEARNERS AND THE LEARNING

The learners in the traditional educational setting predominantly constitute
students preparing for a career. The learning system focuses on class-room
based students and overarches the design and operation of the teaching. The
courses are designed to provide a depth and breadth of knowledge, the rele-
vance of which may not be fully understood by the students. The students
are also aware that the possible application of any knowledge gained is at
a distant horizon, leading to a perception of low relevance that results in

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