Soft skills: toward a sanctimonious discipline

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to achieve sanctimonious status to the soft skills discipline. It explores soft skills in global organizations and educational institutions.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper explains the significance of soft skills and the methods to acquire these. It differentiates between soft and hard skills with examples and illustrations. It draws a blueprint to offer soft skills program. It unveils expository strategy, guided strategy and active strategy for teaching and training soft skills.

Findings

The finding of this study reminds that the world is shifting from knowledge economy to self-knowledge economy and of the importance of soft skills with the advent of artificial intelligence. It enlightens that a judicious blend of hard and soft skills is essential for achieving professional and leadership success. It implores not only to build hard skills but also mind soft skills. It concludes that soft skills are essential for everyone from janitors to chief executives to achieve the desired outcomes.

Research limitations/implications

This paper explains from the academic and organizational perspectives only.

Practical implications

This methodology can be applied in any industry and in any size of organization globally.

Social implications

The social implications of this research suggest that educational institutions and global organizations can adopt these methods and strategies to impart and improve soft skills.

Originality/value

This research explores tools and techniques to measure soft skills. It encourages experiential learning to impart soft skills. It coins an innovative evaluation tool – Meka’s five-level model – to measure soft skills training. It outlines a few sample questions to measure soft skills training. It crafts course curriculum for soft skills. It unveils a list of soft skills essential for leaders.

Citation

Rao, M.S. (2018), "Soft skills: toward a sanctimonious discipline", On the Horizon, Vol. 26 No. 3, pp. 215-224. https://doi.org/10.1108/OTH-06-2017-0034