Step 1: Recognise the Importance of Soft Skills Development and Tracking
Although hard skills are important and useful, many studies prove the significance and necessity of soft skills in the workplace. We have discovered that employees with higher emotional intelligence are able to excel at work and organisations that cultivate soft skills outshine those that do not. Hence, in LinkedIn’s 2019 Global Talents Trend Report, studies show that soft skills matter as much or more than hard skills, and ranked number 1 trend that is important in the future of recruiting HR.
Its importance has created a high demand for measuring and tracking employees’ soft skills development. However, soft skills are often more challenging to evaluate and develop as employees must be prepared to participate in reflections to better understand how developed or lacking their soft skills are first.
Step 2: Define Relevant Soft Skills to Measure
Through data collection from scientifically proven sources, Skilio has discovered that the 5 soft skills most sought after by employers today are:
- Teamwork
- Leadership
- Communication
- Willingness to Learn
- Adaptability
Skilio’s Tip: As there are actually way more than the 5 soft skills we are currently focused on, identify soft skills which are essential for the success of your organisation! Do also check out the SkillsFuture Critical Core Skills framework which are industry-recognised soft skills for employees in Singapore!
Step 3: Measure and Analyse Soft Skills through Behaviour
The first step to soft skill development would be measuring and analysing them. Just like any other skill, we need to access the current state of one’s development of each soft skill first to develop the skills accordingly and effectively.
Hiring managers desire such analysis to better match employees that have the necessary soft skills to accomplish the job most effectively. Likewise, educators and soft skill training companies can benefit from soft skill measurement tools as they assess the mastery of the soft skills of their beneficiaries, improve their programme pedagogy, and measure whether or not these training interventions indeed have impactful outcomes when applied during experiences.
Unlike hard skills, there is no step-by-step guide for demonstrating proficiency in soft skills. Soft skills are seldom quantified because they are seemingly intangible and hence ill-defined (Hale, 2018). As such, we need to first define the behaviours which are constituents of each soft skill.
Step 4: Conduct Behavioural Interviewing through Reflective Practice
We believe that the context should be considered when discussing the exhibition of each soft skill behaviour. Thus, adopting a behavioural interviewing approach to conduct a scientific assessment of the soft skills one has exhibited throughout his experiences for thorough tracking.
Just as Kolb’s Learning Styles and Experiential Learning Cycle depicts, the acquisition of one’s soft skills have to go through actual contextualised experiences, followed by guided reflection, the conceptualisation of one’s learnings and thereafter applying these learnings during subsequent milestones.
Skilio’s Tip: Unlike behavioural interviewing practised by many currently, Skilio focuses largely on a retrospective form instead of a prospective form of data collection, emphasizing the individual’s past behaviours and its results, better predicting one’s future behaviour in such situations.
Step 5: Measure Soft Skill Interaction through Crowdsourced Feedback
As mentioned previously, soft skills are commonly defined as people skills and are largely manifested during experiences that involve soft skill interaction and collaborative experiences. That is to say, it is largely the case where multiple people are involved in a soft skill interaction milestone together.
Consequently, 360-degree feedback and peer feedback are increasingly in use for corporates and in educational institutions respectively today.
Skilio’s Tip:
The Johari’s Window Model as it is an appropriate illustration of our intended outcomes of incorporating crowdsourced feedback onto our platform. We hope that we can first facilitate the awareness of the various facets of one’s “Soft Skill Johari Window” through one’s self-reflections and crowdsourced feedback. This allows for our platform to generate actionables which allows for one to start working towards the holistic development of one’s soft skills gradually.
Conclusion
As we understand that assessing soft skills development is difficult for many, Skilio is utilising artificial intelligence (AI) and analysing soft skills insights to equip and empower organisations with a soft skills measurement and analytics platform.
Our Skilio team strongly believes that the measurement and analytics of these essential skills is the first step to developing soft skills for all. Be it students, educators, training companies or corporates, the importance of soft skills now precedes many other systems and processes that have to be set in place in these institutions.
With that, Skilio prides ourselves as thought leaders, in building future-ready generations, by developing soft skills through experiences.
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