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This paper is part of a bigger research project and focuses on issues related to soft skills and teaching professional training. The research project is on developing an integrated soft skills training module for teacher education program in Malaysian Public Universities. The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent of soft skills that has been integrated in teaching professional training from the novice teachers' perspectives. The issues of unemployment and lack of quality among teachers are associated with the notion that teachers have not adequately acquired employability skills and soft skills during their training in universities. At the preliminary stage, 15 novice teachers who have graduated from five identified public universities for not more than three years were interviewed. There are a total of three focus group interview cycles. The interview protocol consists of seven soft skills are: communication, critical and problem solving, team work, life-long learning and management of information, entrepreneurship, ethics, moral and professional, and leadership. The findings showed that six out of seven soft skills were perceived as important and relevant to their teaching tasks except entrepreneurship skill. However, these novice teachers were concerned about the insufficient soft skills acquired from teaching training in order to support them in their work place. Since soft skills are important prerequisite in shaping an individual's personality, therefore it is recommended that teacher educators should utilize the integrated soft skills training module during teaching professional training.

Soft skills complement hard skills and have a significant impact on the ability of teachers to do their job and on their employability. Soft skill components acquired by future holistic human capital are communicative skills, critical thinking and problem solving skills, team work skill, life-long learning and management of information, entrepreneurship skill, ethics, moral and professional skill, and leadership skill. This research aims to investigate gaps related to soft skills obtained from their teaching professional training compared to the soft skills needed in their workplace among the novice teachers. A total sample of 250 novice teachers was selected from all secondary schools in Malaysia by employing purposive sampling. This study employs the quantitative method to collect data from novice teachers during their induction year. The findings showed that team work skill and communication skill were the two most important soft skill components, not only very much needed in their workplace but also gained from their teaching training program. However, entrepreneurship skill was the least capacity soft skill component needed in their workplace as well as gained from their teaching training program. According to the results of t-test analysis, there is a significant difference between the gained and needed level of soft skill components. In addition, the mean score for all the soft skill components needed in their workplace are higher than what they gained from their teaching training program.

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This article reviews the literature on parental involvement and children’s education, focusing on the primary school level in Malaysia. This systematic literature review (henceforth SLR) includes searching, screening, appraising and synthesising of articles on parental involvement published in the last ten years (2012- 2021) from a number of electronic databases, namely SCOPUS, Taylor & Francis, ERIC, Google Scholar, MyCite, and ResearchGate. The findings of this review identify 24 relevant articles and reveal that most of the relevant research was conducted quantitatively with a focus on types and levels of parental involvement as well as particular applied parental involvement models. Besides that, the researchers utilise multiple conceptualisations of parental involvement including home-based and school-based. This study suggests that more qualitative research is needed to fully comprehend the many forms of parental involvement used by parents. It may also be beneficial for researchers to use the Malaysian Ministry of Education’s Parents/Caregivers Toolkit as a framework or instrument to investigate parental involvement to gain more relevant findings.