Expanded Yet Restricted: A Mini Review of the Soft Skills Literature

Abstract

There has been a progressively heightened preoccupation with soft skills among education stakeholders such as policymakers, educational psychologists, and researchers. Soft skill curricula have been considered these days and developed not only for graduates and as on-the-job training programs but also for students across all levels of education. However, different people mean different things when referring to soft skills. This review presents evidence to suggest that the use of the term "soft skills" has expanded to encompass a variety of qualities, traits, values, and attributes, as well as rather distinct constructs such as emotional labor and lookism. It is argued here that these infinite categories of things can be skills because soft skills research is primarily focused on what are the needs and requirements in the world of work. This approach is problematic because it assigns characteristics to soft skills, which in turn affect the design of the soft skills curricula. For example, soft skills are often construed as decontextualized behaviors, which can be acquired and transferred unproblematically. The paper proposes that an in-depth and embedded approach to studying soft skills should be pursued to reach a consensus on what they are and how to develop them because otherwise they will always be expanded before restricted (as they have become ambiguous) in their meaning and definition.

The Soft Skills of Special Education Teachers: Evidence from the Literature

“…The concept of soft skills has been considered in human resources, management, psychology, education, and the social sciences in general. However, some consensus has been found around the definition as a set of technical, methodological, and practical skills that is dynamically activated and manifested in performance [24][25][26][27]. Based on the concept of competence, it assumes the operationalization of a set of knowledge and attitudes in a specific situation in order to achieve specific results [28,29].…”

Soft Skills for Entry-Level Engineers: What Employers Want

“…Skills generally refer to abilities people have acquired over time with effort or training and always involve an element of execution or performance [17,18]. Hard skills in an engineering context refer to technical skills or abilities that are required to perform work related tasks.…”

“…Soft skills on the other hand are less tangible, hard to quantify, and rather challenging to define. In contrast to technical knowledge or abilities, the term 'soft skills' is used loosely in literature to denote a disparate set of personal attributes, traits, attitudes, and behaviors [4,17].…”

“…Accrediting bodies, such as ABET, have reiterated the need for engineering education programs to provide students opportunities to acquire a broader set of skills to improve their ability to collaborate, work in teams, and thrive in a globalized work environment [1]. Soft skills that were considered 'nice to have' within technical fields in the last century are moving to the 'need to have' category in the current century [15][16][17].…”

Soft Skills wanted?! – (Arbeits)Fähigkeiten und Fähigkeitsanforderungen am Arbeitsplatz beschreiben mit dem Fähigkeitsrating Mini-ICF-APP

“…Spezifische soziale und personale "Fähigkeiten" -oder auch "Soft Skills" genannt (Newman 2006;Touloumakos 2020) -werden in diesem ICF-basierten Fähigkeitskonzept verstanden als Gruppierungen von zusammen passenden Verhaltensweisen und Aktivitäten : Beispielsweise gehören Aktivitäten wie lächeln, jemanden ansehen, ansprechen, unverbindliche Fragen stellen und auf Fragen antworten zur Fähigkeit "Kontaktfähigkeit". Vielfältige psychische Fähigkeiten werden tagtäglich in der Arbeit gebraucht, bspw.…”