Soft or Work Skills Training

Soft or Work Skill Development

We often hear talk about generic work skills, soft skills or digital related, but what are they and why are they important?

Soft Work Skills for Students Trainees and Employees (Image copyright Pexels)

Hard skills may shortlist you for a job interview, but soft skills will have you selected, and may include the following which could also be described as personal attributes or selection criteria:

Communication, Organization, Teamwork, Punctuality, Critical Thinking, Social Skills, Creativity, Interpersonal Communication, Adaptability and Friendliness (Berger 2016).

According to Harvard Business Review article ‘DEVELOPING EMPLOYEES: The Soft Skills of Great Digital Organizations’:

Smart organizations have recognized that introducing new technology into the workplace isn’t about hardware or software: it’s about wetware, also known as human beings. If you want to be the kind of nimble business that can make the most of successive waves of tech innovation, you need human beings who can adapt to change. That means equipping each person in your enterprise with the skills and mindset that will help them successfully adapt whenever you introduce new tools like Slack, Basecamp, or even Google Drive into your workplace. But what exactly are these digital skills? They may be more familiar and low-tech than you think (Samuel 2016).

These could include goal focus, collaboration, communication, learning, troubleshooting and enjoyment.

Another view from traditional work of soft skills would designate planning workload, communication, reports, presentations, collecting/using information, note taking, data literacy, projects, ethics, problem solving, decision making, team work, meetings, negotiation, stress management and reviewing one’s own personal skills and development (Bingham and Drew 1999).

How does one develop these soft or work skills for work, community and life?

According to Open Colleges Australia the following tips are needed to teach students soft skills:

30 Tips to Teach Soft Skills

1. Give students authentic choices about how they’re going to learn and be assessed.
2. Provide a learning environment where trust, initiative, and taking risks are encouraged.
3. Hold all students to the same high standards.
4. Model perseverance by not giving up on students.
5. Support students by helping them find their own way.
6. Demonstrate alternate paths to content mastery.
7. Teach to the whole person (not just the “student”).
8. Treat your students as mature individuals, even when they aren’t following instructions.
9. Talk about tailoring communication styles for different audiences.
10. Build students’ interpersonal skills through an environment of humility and respect.
11. Help students practise taking on different roles in different situations.
12. Differentiate opportunities for personal growth and opportunities for team growth.
13. Cultivate a sense of responsibility through meaningful and unique contribution.
14. Assign group exercises that give people the opportunity to speak, listen, write, organise, and lead.
15. Assess learning through interactive evaluations that demand real-world demonstrations of learning.
16. Challenge students’ reactions to new obstacles and situations.
17. Emphasise that the same solution doesn’t necessarily work every time, even in the same situation.
18. Incorporate exercises in delayed gratification in order to build persistence and grit.
19. Start grading students on how well they listen to their peers.
20. Discuss the importance of social-emotional intelligence in the real world.
21. Design opportunities for students to build and demonstrate resilience.
22. Make learning a personal experience, highlighting the way education shapes personality.
23. Create opportunities for students to innovate, both on their own and in groups.
24. Draw attention to the differences between online and in-person social etiquette.
25. Reward students who are willing to admit they’re wrong.
26. Recognise students who are committed to communicating ideas to others.
27. Hold brainstorm sessions in which students list the possible uses for various soft skills.
28. Help build motivation through principles of self-reliance (read: Emerson, Thoreau).
29. Keep an open ear and encourage students to develop new thoughts and ideas they may have.
30. Develop learning ability through greater awareness of individual learning processes (Briggs 2015).

Teaching, training or tutoring approaches to learning need to be centred upon student centred andragogy for adults not teacher centred pedagogy for children, see related article blog FLIPPED Model – Pedagogy or Andragogy in Higher Education Teaching Learning.

References:

Berger, G 2016, Data Reveals The Most In-demand Soft Skills Among Candidates, LinkedIn Talent Blog, 30 August, viewed 30 March 2018, < https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/trends-and-research/2016/most-indemand-soft-skills >


Bingham, R & Drew, S 1999, Key Work Skills, 1st edn, Gower Publishing Ltd., Aldershot.


Briggs, S 2015, 30 Tips to Cultivate Soft Skills in Your Students, Inform Ed – Open Colleges, 1 May, viewed 30 March 2018, < https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/30-ways-to-cultivate-soft-skills-in-your-students >


Samuel, A 2016, ‘DEVELOPING EMPLOYEES: The Soft Skills of Great Digital Organizations’, Harvard Business Review, 5 February, viewed 21 March 2018,
< https://hbr.org/2016/02/the-soft-skills-of-great-digital-organizations >

Digital Marketing Research

Digital or e-Marketing Research for Strategy Development

Conducting Qualitative and Quantitative Feedback - Focus Respondent Interviews for Survey Instrument Development

Following outlines steps in applying research techniques for marketing using a MBA cohort of professionals of diverse backgrounds mostly based in Europe.

Focus Group Interviews to Inform Surveys
(Image copyright Pexels)

Limited interviews, both face to face and email based, were conducted with selected former students and industry stakeholders for experiential feedback to ascertain or confirm important factors.  After analysis of feedback, this led onto the development of a simple survey instrument with the factors or clusters of elicited, making up dimensions or phases (Saunders et al., 2009).  One could then measure or relate the importance of each factor in the information search amongst a related population or student cohort, then drawing inferences, but neither correlations nor causal relationships.


While optimal language and communication skills are important for questionnaires, there must be a process of researching, identifying and forming the questions to be included in a survey, that leads to valid and reliable data for analysis; one cannot go back after collecting survey data.


Ordinal Likert scales can be used to assess the strength of perceptions on relevant factors, on a three, five or seven-point range and can indicate order e.g. not very important through neutral to very important.  Ideally scales are applied to many factors or questions leading to inference of a construct explaining the research focus.  In this study, simply assessing relevance of each factor grouped as phases or dimensions for inclusion e.g. if deemed to be important or very important by students (Bell, 2005).


While the quantitative data collection or survey was a ‘probability sample’ or ‘representative sampling’ i.e. all from the same online MBA cohort, to allow inferences to be made about the population, the ‘Focus Respondents’ informing the survey development represented ‘non-probability’ sampling for convenience or streamlining.


By accessing ‘Focus Respondents’ and gaining input from potential population, also including informed input from industry personnel, industry and scholastic research; a valid survey instrument could be developed (Saunders at al., 2009).


The sample population of university students surveyed represent the population’s ‘information seeking’ behaviour, through collecting quantitative data from this representative sample of enrolled European University students in online MBA program.


Ideally this could have been expanded further amongst other sample populations for comparison and cross tabulation, but the scope of this study precluded inclusion, however actual colleges, public organisations and SME business workplaces can replicate the process.

Reference List:

Bell, J. (2005) Doing Your Research Project. (4th Ed.). Maidenhead: Open University Press.


Saunders, M., Lewis, P. & Thornhill, A. (2009) Research Methods for Business Students. (5th Ed.) Harlow UK: Pearson Education Ltd.

Focus Group Feedback Coding

Focus Group Research Feedback - Qualitative Data Analysis – Grounded Theory & Coding

Potential respondents must have the ethics of research explained before any interview or feedback, not only verbally at start of an interview or related interaction, but inclusion on a briefing document explaining study and research, storage of data, along with ethics.

Focus Group Interview Feedback Analysis (Image copyright Pexels)

Focus Group Interviews

Focus interviews, individual or via a group, based on psychoanalysis, can be very adaptable, allow expression of body language, in addition to concept checking or informal communication which would be precluded by the written form.  However, there are disadvantages, interviews can be very time consuming to conduct, transcribe, code and analyse when using open questions to elicit perceptions, attitudes and experience of the research area, plus they can be subjective or prone to bias.  On the other hand, they are useful to explore same perceptions etc., then importantly, used to inform a valid survey or data collection instrument or further research (Bell, 2005).


Types of interview include structured e.g. answering survey face to face, semi-structured and unstructured, the latter allows good quality data to be offered.  The unstructured interview can offer an opportunity for an industry person to explain and elaborate on issues that have emerged organically, that would have otherwise remained unknown and ignored (Ibid.).

Focus Group Interview Feedback Respondents

The ‘Focus Respondents’ for this research study included two former international students now professionals with digital literacy, two international education marketing (and admissions) managers for large multinational education providers and two more senior ‘Focus Respondents’ who manage within international education, but without formal marketing background.


‘Focus Respondents’ were asked open questions based upon the literature and round the information search process with any critical issues, key words, processes or phenomenon to be expressed, not in long narrative for full transcription, but abbreviated for notes and action coding.


It was explained to focus respondents, to give them structure or context, that the general focus was decision making behaviour process, represented by a five-stage model:

Purchase Decision Making Model

Five Stage Purchase Decision Behaviour Model or Process (simplified)

• Recognition of Need
• Information Search
• Evaluation of Alternatives
• Purchase Decision
• Post Purchase Behaviour

 (Kotler & Keller, 2012).

From same focus interviews regarding information search or discovery process, the research elicited factors or latent variables, then quantified by survey to analyse for significance of these factors in ‘optimal marketing and communications’.  These factors and construct can then be used to develop an information seeking construct and a useful template for industry.


Next step is to deliver survey to a hopefully significant sample population to then ground any marketing strategy development.

Reference List:

Bell, J. (2005) Doing Your Research Project. (4th Ed.). Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Kotler, P. & Keller, K. (2012) Marketing Management. (14^th Ed.) Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education – Prentice Hall.