Soft skills play an important role for achieving professional growth and employment. With the knowledge of soft skills, one stands out in a crowd of job seekers with even mediocre skill and talent. There is no doubt that hard skills, that is knowledge and technical expertise are prime requirement for your career but without soft skills it becomes difficult for even highly talented people to corner a job. The most common traits asked by every prospective employer are positive work ethics, good attitude, and desire to learn and be trained. Good attitude being a behavioural skill cannot be taught. But consistent practice and training can instil that in a person. Right perspective and readiness to learn and turn the situation to a positive outcome, take any challenge. So, the job seekers must possess soft skills to attract the employer. The objectives of soft skill training are:
- A realistic perspective of work and work expectations.
- To develop problem solving skills.
- To guide individuals in making appropriate and responsible decisions.
- To create a desire to fulfil individual goals.
- To motivate the individuals and defeating emotional impulses and self-defeating behaviours.
Soft skills area combination of interpersonal skills, social skills, communication skills, character traits, attitudes, career attributes and emotional intelligence quotient (EQ) among others. Technical knowledge of any subject is considered hard skill. Soft skills are also called corporate skills. Soft skills can be more useful and practical. A soft skill can be expressed as a cluster of productive personality traits that characterize one’s relationships in a social environment with other people and the key three abilities or elements are people skills, social skills and personal career attributes, in other words social skills is an umbrella term for skills under this functional element. Soft skills re the skills are concerned with working with other people, ensuring customer satisfaction, being a team player or leader while delivering a high-quality product within budget and on time and exceeding the expectations of the stakeholders. It includes diversity of skills which is essential for a go getter individual to work in this century. In twenty first century workforce, soft skills are important in every business sector. However, employers in business continuously report that new employee are deficient of these soft skills.
St. Xavier’s Bangalore understands the importance of these soft skills for those entering into the working world because these workers are the business leaders of the future. That is why PGDM offers soft skill training needed for the workers in the course. Business leaders must obtain soft skills as hard skills in order to be viewed as effective leaders. It can be observed that education is an essential tool for achieving sustainability. We all realized that the current economic development trends are not sustainable and that public awareness, education and training are the key elements to move poor society towards sustainability. Only a quality future human capital can envision development of its nation to meet needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Therefore St. Xavier’s Bangalore emphasis the inculcation of soft skills among the students will be of two merits, to produce quality human capital and to develop their knowledge, understanding, values and skills as well.