Importance of soft skills

Navigating the Path to Success Importance of soft skills

Current time requirement is evolving rapidly. Due to technological advancement, work requiring less skills are replaced by machines. In Banks, a decade back tellers, pass book printing assistant, cheque processing manpower was recruited in large numbers.. Do we see them today? A single machine replaced many jobs at a time. With stress given to capital intensive industries, the average performing employees are in danger of employability.

So what is the solution?

When students decide their career paths, when stream selection and course preferences are thought about, when college entrance preparation are pondered on, soft skills should be given importance.

Few characteristics of man will always keep him over technology, no matter what! While taking up high school and higher secondary learning, schools should inculcate activities that foster team spirit during teenage.

Instead of just focusing on scores, students should be given an environment where they learn critical thinking. Students should be provided hypothetical situations where they develop problem solving ability.

Whatsoever skill set students possess , if they fail to communicate effectively, there are chances that they will not get desired accelerated growth. At early age if students get exposed to internships, they learn communicating various ages, gender and different mindset people.

Life is all about being adaptable to changing circumstances. It is important that students learn this at earliest possible stage. For this, they can be taught at venues other than classrooms. They should face odd physical environment and non routine food so that they learn important element of being flexible. Adaptability is an essential soft skill an individual must possess. This begins at early age.

1. Communication

Students need to learn public speaking. They should engage in activities where they are exposed to stage. They should be encouraged to speak in class, school assembly, during parents meet, debate competition, MUN, group discussion etc

Along with speaking, communication involves listening, understanding the opposite person, analysing situation, being empathetic, handling power with gentle approach, thinking about organisation and solving problems with win win agreement.

2. Time management

It is a crucial to manage time at every level of work. At early age if this skill is mastered, it enables an individual to achieve targets stresslessly. Students should be given time bound work to learn managing work following the timeline. Not only in terms of projects, home work, sports or exam, they can be given 1 minute tasks for writing, speaking, acting etc.. This would fascinate them and inculcate an element of quick actions in them. They can also be given task to shoot 1 minute videos of their study topics, engaging technology in education will allow them learn concepts quickly

3. Interpersonal intelligence

Students are good at interpreting situations but their mindset is such where desired human emotions do not have larger share. If at early age or in teen age students are exposed towards meeting people people working in different fields and profession. When they meet police officers, nurses, doctors, CA, lawyers, cyber security professionals, business man, industrialists etc, they not only understand about traditional concepts of their working but also about how they deal with humans

When students are given group projects , there should be a combination comprising of strong and weak ones together so that they inculcate empathy within themselves

4. Problem Solving and Critical Thinking

Students can enhance their out of the box thinking by learning various logic based programming like lego, coding, website building, analytics and web development. Students can be given projects on observation, thinking about their own thinking through situational analysis.

Students when are given simple topics to research on, they will learn to collect data, analyse , logically interpret and finally learn to opine according to their belief system.