Soft skills requirements in software development jobs: a cross‐cultural empirical study

Abstract

Different parts of the world have different cultures and culture has an impact on the way people perceive, plan and execute any assignment. The success and failure stories of software projects reveal that human factors are one of the significantly important issues. Psychological theories assert that people have different personality traits and these personality traits are pigeonholed by soft skills or emotional intelligence.Most of the studies carried out on human factor in software engineering concentrate primarily on personality traits. However, soft skills which largely determine personality traits have been given comparatively little attention by researchers from software engineering community. The main objective of this work is to find out whether employers' soft skills requirements, as advertised in job postings, within different roles of software development are similar across different cultures. We used a dataset of 500 job descriptions from four different regions of the world in this study. We found that in the cases of designer, programmer and tester substantial similarity exits for the requirements of soft skills whereas only in case of system analyst dissimilarity is present across different cultures.

Cultivating ICT students’ interpersonal soft skills in online learning environments using traditional active learning techniques.

“…One of the difficulties in creating effective OLEs is student isolation, which is said to invoke an individual-centric model of learning that encourages discrete study rather than teamwork (Haythornthwaite, Kazmer, Robins, & Shoemaker, 2000;Morgan & Tam, 1999). Despite this, employers still insist that a key learning objective of ICT graduates is the ability to work in team environments as this mirrors work force requirements (Ahmed et al, 2012;Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency, 2013). Due to this need, group exercises and projects have become an important component of higher education (Blackman, 2012;Friedman, Cox, & Maher, 2008;Myers, Monypenny, & Trevathan, 2012).…”

“…Soft skills increase the employability of graduates who can demonstrate effective communication skills with clients and colleagues (McMurtrey, Downey, Zeltmann, & Friedman, 2008). Some researchers contend that these skills are often overlooked within the tertiary level curriculum, particularly with the recent shift towards online delivery (Ahmed, Capretz, Bouktif, & Campbell, 2012;Chan, 2011).…”

Content analysis of vacancy advertisements for employability skills: Challenges and opportunities for informing curriculum development

“…Longitudinal studies showed changing skill requirements over time with increased emphasis on soft skills rather than job or profession-specific skills (Hawkins et al, 2000;Quinn & Rochford, 2013;Cramer & Tenzek, 2014). Monitoring of market trends to define current skill requirements was well supported although cultural and other contextual differences were acknowledged, (Cullen 2003;Den Hartog et al, 2007;Ahmed, Capritz, Bouktif, & Campbell 2012;Reeves & Hahn, 2012;Kuokkanen et al, 2013;Ahsan et al, 2013). In fact one third (13) of the studies specifically recommended that HEI should use their findings for academic advising, updating curriculum and to help new graduates align with skill requirements of industry.…”

“…One study revealed a poor match between curriculum and professional competency lists (France 2010). Three studies saw value in current employees, employers, human resources managers or graduates using their findings (Ahsan et al, 2012;Ahmed et al, 2012;Messum et al, 2011). The importance of work experience was also confirmed and taken to support the importance of work integrated learning and industry placements, (Messum et al, 2011).…”

A Call to Promote Soft Skills in Software Engineering

“…cc Engineering software revolves around methodologies establishing (more or less) well-defined processes to develop a product. 21 However, because people execute these processes, no matter how good they are, the ultimate success lies in how the processes are being executed especially when people interact. The successful implementation of any process methodology ultimately depends on how employees perceive that methodology.…”