Soft Skills Integration in Teaching Professional Training: Novice Teachers’ Perspectives

Abstract

This paper is part of a bigger research project and focuses on issues related to soft skills and teaching professional training. The research project is on developing an integrated soft skills training module for teacher education program in Malaysian Public Universities. The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent of soft skills that has been integrated in teaching professional training from the novice teachers’ perspectives. The issues of unemployment and lack of quality among teachers are associated with the notion that teachers have not adequately acquired employability skills and soft skills during their training in universities. At the preliminary stage, 15 novice teachers who have graduated from five identified public universities for not more than three years were interviewed. There are a total of three focus group interview cycles. The interview protocol consists of seven soft skills are: communication, critical and problem solving, team work, life-long learning and management of information, entrepreneurship, ethics, moral and professional, and leadership. The findings showed that six out of seven soft skills were perceived as important and relevant to their teaching tasks except entrepreneurship skill. However, these novice teachers were concerned about the insufficient soft skills acquired from teaching training in order to support them in their work place. Since soft skills are important prerequisite in shaping an individual's personality, therefore it is recommended that teacher educators should utilize the integrated soft skills training module during teaching professional training.