Developing Student Soft Skills in Curriculum
Soft skills and communication are two terms that are frequently associated and for good reason. For the simple fact that once you begin to unpack the term soft skills into key competencies the issue of communication appears frequently.
Soft skills and communication
Soft skills and communication are two terms that are frequently associated and for good reason. For the simple fact that once you begin to unpack the term soft skills into key competencies the issue of communication appears frequently.
In fact, one important survey on the subject (Crawford et al., 2011) ranks communication skill as the number one soft skill. More tellingly, it is the core competency that all stakeholders, whether they be employers, faculty, students and alumni all agree on, as they all rank communication as the number one soft skill.
Incorporating soft skills into curriculum
This result has key implications for education and curriculum development. How to integrate soft skills, and especially communication skills as an integral part of the students’ learning? At ABSParis, we have adopted a two-prong approach.
We teach the skill of public speaking as a foundation course as part of the Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) and also as part of the Bachelor in Fashion and Luxury Retail Management. This course allows students to gain in confidence and acquire other related skills of rhetoric, such as persuasion and influence.
The other approach is to actually make soft skills the focus of the course itself. Many of our students take Theater and Improvisation for Business as a follow-up to Public Speaking. The goal in this course is to raise students’ self-awareness and increase their understanding of the impact they have on others. Self-awareness and social awareness might be considered as bookends of the emotional intelligence continuum. Thus, one of the key advantages of courses like Theater and Improvisation for Business is that it allows students to see important connections embedded in soft skills. For example, they get to experience and practice active listening and, at the same time, to see how this interconnects with empathy – another important dimension of emotional intelligence.
Developing soft skills, especially communication skills, is essential for today’s students to equip them for their role as managers.
For more information, contact Danny Rukavina: drukavina@igensia.com
