Page 368 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

356 | Model Question Papers

• Relational communication follows a participant as opposed to an observer perspective.
• A relational message is directed toward a specific target as opposed to a generalized
audience.
• Relational communication typically focuses on dyadic interaction between sender
and receiver and may use the dyad as the unit of analysis.

4 a. Soft skills are 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. One of the
keys to successful relationships is to develop soft skills. In today’s fast changing pace
of technology, hard skills are continuously in need of being updated. A technologist’s
hard skills and his or her related state-of-the-art knowledge require continuous regen-
eration. Similarly, the importance of having soft skills in students needs an emphasis.
A student who has interpersonal problem and another who has difficulty in making a
choice about his career suffers from lack of soft skills. Hence, a continuous renewal of
soft skills in terms of teaching and training to students is called for. This will facilitate
their being effective and successful.
According to Daniel Coleman, emotional intelligence, or EQ—referring to a com-
bination of competencies that contribute to a person’s ability to manage his or her-
self 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 the psychologist, but it also helps create more successful 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 job candidate to possess was interpersonal skills,
followed by written or verbal communication skills, and the ability to work under
pressure. Technical skills and knowledge were at the bottom of the list—this may be
due to the fact that technical competency for the job is assumed. 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.
b. According to this model, impression of others’ involves two major components: concrete
examples of behaviours that are consistent with a given trait-exemplars of this trait; and
mental summaries that are abstracted from repeated observations of others’ behaviour-
abstractions, as they are usually termed. Some models of information formation stress
the role of behaviour exemplars. These models suggest that, when we make judgments

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