Teaching Soft Skills: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Practice Pedagogy and Evaluation: The Case of Ensa

Abstract

It is often said that hard skills or technical knowledge will get you an interview but soft skills will tremendously increase your chances to get and keep the job. Hard skills are the skills or technical knowledge we need to do our job adequately, whereas human skills are the skills we need to be better human beings with a better character. Hard skills answer the question of how well you can do at work. Soft skills or human skills, however, answer the questions like what kind of person you are. How well you can get on with people around you. Are you someone people can trust and feel comfortable working with or someone people distrust because you are annoying as a team member, you constantly get people into unnecessary arguments or you make them uncomfortable because of your negative mind set and/or suspicious attitude?. It seems, therefore, that teaching human skills is no longer a luxury but an obligation. The problem, however, is that oftentimes our attempt to teach essential life skills consists simply of teaching about them; we mistakenly treat life skills like hard skills both at the level of instruction and evaluation. We assume that teaching a set of vocabulary items or concepts related to soft skills would suffice to help student acquire those skills. This paper suggests that soft Skills cannot be taught; they are caught. For this reason, it is contended that there is a desperate need to see soft skills with a different lens. It puts forwards a paradigm shift in soft skill instruction in practice, pedagogy, and evaluation. It is high time we discontinued teaching life skills as a set of concepts and vocabulary items. Instead, we need to adopt a teaching though coaching and evaluation through experiential and oral schemes. We need to reconsider our role as soft skill teachers and students, our teaching methodology and finally the learning environment within which life skills are being developed and evaluated.