Ideas for adding soft skills education to service learning and capstone courses for computer science students

Abstract

Soft skills such as communication, teamwork, and organization are important to students' future success in the working world. Faculty members know it, students know it, and employers are explicitly asking for these skills. Are computer science departments responsible to teach these skills? If so, where in the curriculum should they be covered? This paper explores the soft skills that employers want, and possible places to include the teaching of those skills in the curriculum. It then shows how an extensive set of soft skills were incorporated into a service learning course for the students in the Mathematical, Information and Computer Sciences department at Point Loma Nazarene University. Finally, it makes suggestions as to how other service learning or capstone courses could be altered to afford more opportunity for soft skill education.