The meaning of soft skills in the modern professional career

Abstract

This article identifies the importance of students’ soft skills building for education and their future career. Modern professional activity does not require only specific knowledge, but also soft skills necessary for specific professional field. Presently, soft skills play vital roles in the workplace for they raise professional levels and promote successful careers. Therefore, the purpose of higher education is to produce specialists able to work in competitive environments, which require introducing technologies that form students’ soft skills. In the article, we have justified the choice of the most valuable students’ personal and professional qualities required for forming soft skills in the learning process. The importance of self-organization and ability to work on a team has been revealed on the basis of analyzing psychological and pedagogical literature. The relevance of self-organization and working collaboratively has been supported by data obtained from the soft skills ratings provided by Russian and western employers. We found that soft skills based on the quality of self-organization and working on a team are in the Top-10 of analyzed ratings demonstrating their importance in Russia’s modern labor market. Consequently, the assessment technology aimed at forming students’ personal and professional skills will be developed and tested during final stages of our research.