Soha (Soft & Hard) Intelligence- A Fulcrum of High Performance of Teachers in HEIs

Abstract

It has been observed that majority of the Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) in India are focused on equipping and skilling the students in their domain knowledge. And for decades together students and parents have been optimistically reciprocating to this modus operandi of HEIs of focusing on technical education. However, with the dawn of Industry 4.0, the expectations of Industry from their employees have also undergone a noticeable transformation. They now expect their employees to be holistically knowledgeable and skilled to handle jobs and situational challenges that come along with their job profile. On the other hand, HEIs in India have been skilling students majorly on technical or domain expertise or (we researchers name it) as Hard Skills and have fallen short in skilling them on the Soft Skills/Intelligence. However, unfortunately this area of skilling students on the Soft Intelligence has been overlooked by HEIs viz-a viz developing their technical competence or Hard Skills. This is because the teachers of HEIs have no orientation whatsoever in the nitty gritties of Soft Skills/ Intelligence in one's personal and professional development. Until and Unless the teachers are skilled on Soft Skills/ Intelligence they will not be equipped to skill students on Soft Skills and thereby cater to their holistic development. The paper proposes to investigate the impact of a combination of Soft Skills alongside Hard Skills (SOHA) on performance of teachers of HEIs.