What are soft skills and what's an effective way to teach them?

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I work with folks who mostly have a hard science or engineering background. Recently the topic of teaching/learning soft skills was brought up to management. Any suggestions on what soft skills are and how to teach them?
(Personal examples would be great. Not looking for a textbook PhD dissertation level answer)

Professional Development
Training & Development
Soft Skills Development
Philip Tuet
68 months ago

8 answers

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Hi Philip,
It is an important thing. I teach a course on IoT. However, IoT is not just technology! It is partly seamless blending, application as well as presentation. They need to present, sell the idea, etc. So I give tasks that have all the required soft components sewed together!
So define a goal which has many ingredients and when they complete each step they move towards the goal but also accumulate the experience w.r.t to soft skills.
Softskills you can't teach in a class, it could be taught only by providing avenues to experience it. Please be patient and offer advice, allow them to fail sincerely!
Hope this answer helps!

Venkatesha Prasad
68 months ago
Thank you for the thoughtful answer, especially the point of allowing them to fail sincerely.. Creating that safe space will be critical.. - Philip 68 months ago
Improvement of Soft skills is more challenging to do with knowledge which is closely linked with a person’s character, takes conscious effort, ongoing practice, commitment and self-development. - Er. Jangyadutta 68 months ago
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Greetings, Philip Tuet,

In my experience, this is a segment I have consistently engaged to ensure core technology individuals are mentored with right soft skills or what i would call as business skills.

I would like to share my thoughts in two parts:

Part 1 - Business Communication and Engaging Content Development

I encourage the following essentials skills to be looked into:

  • Business Communication - Mails, Internal/External stakeholder engagement, conduct or participate in meetings, presentation, story telling for presentation, and interpersonal communication
  • Engaging Content - Engineers produce content like design specs, technical specs, test & validation documents, prototypes, building proof of concepts, etc require good skills on content modelling and basics of research writing, white papers, case study documents, and blogs.


Part 2 - Essential Skills for Success

  • Creativity / Innovation
  • Self-Discipline, Focus, and Time-Management
  • Attention to Detail
  • Cultural Sensitivity
  • Problem-solving
  • Leadership and Management skills to be coached as engineers grow their expertise/experience
  • Collaboration and Cohesive Team Working
  • Learn, Un-Learn, and Re-Learn


There are several more, that can be appended after the foundational training that I have shared in Part 2 is addressed.

How to teach these skills
My suggestion:

  • Build these skills in real-time by practice and consistently working with feedback, preferred format would be workshop based-trainings, several free tutorials with examples are available, and engaging a communication coach for couple of weeks would benefit.
  • Several trainings related to Business Communication are driven through virtual classroom and are acquired over time by paying attention to detail right from when an individual writes a mail.


Hope this helps !!

Dr Sai Kavitha KrishnaIyengar
68 months ago
This is very helpful indeed. Thank you for the thorough answer. You've provided a lot of details that I'll have to spend more time reflecting on. - Philip 68 months ago
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Soft skills are essential in any activity. Of course, in activities that you need to interact and deal with customers it is even more important.
Typically it is a hard challenge to demonstrate to my students in the IT field that soft skills are really important also in this sector. The best way to make them feel about the importance of soft skills is through group projects, where peer interaction becomes essential, responsibility for their actions, impact of their decisions on others, ability to communicate an idea, the ability to debate, etc. In companies these skills become even more relevant and are vital for their professional future.

Fernando Almeida
68 months ago
Thank you for reinforcing the importance of practicing group interactions to develop the interpersonal communication skill. - Philip 68 months ago
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Learning soft skills in a workplace come with time. Many of the soft skills people possess or portray, cannot necessarily be though in a class. They may arise as a result of continual interactions with colleagues, interactions with general people who have not expertise on what one does (general public), failures and challenges one has encountered over their working time (you may call it experience), etc. Some of these can also be built specifically as a result of a particular specialty (eg. people who work in the communication or HR or PRO over time become easily approachable and develop good interpersonal skills, etc). Consciously trying to teach individuals soft skill may come about by assigning them task that allow them to daily use them. In that way it easily becomes part of them. I personally work as a hardcore scientist. I recently took a job which require me to teach community people the science in easily comprehensible way possible without necessarily having to mention any jargon. I had to trains student on public engagement and the way I went about it was to group them to communities and ask them to learn about the communities. At the end of each week, they report on things (mostly behavior) from the community and how they are planning to solve that. Whatever they propose, i supervise them the following week in the community. After one month of this exercise, I had teams that had learnt a lot of soft skills and easily co-operate and communicate well with the community members.
Of the soft skills that were needed included adaptability, teamwork spirit, development of creative ways of presenting hardcore topics in simple terms without loosing the content (problem solving), they learn to bury their individual differences and respect each other as well as the communities they were working in.
By this, I will not define but explain soft skills to be naturally inherent traits or aptitudes that allow one to get tasks accomplished and relate with others in the process. Sometimes the individual has them but has not had opportunity to exhibit them. Once the platform is presented for their use, one grows in them.

I hope this makes sense to you.

Yaw Aniweh (PhD)
68 months ago
It does makes sense. I appreciate your personal example of giving an assignment, observing, and then providing constructive feedback.. It sounds like in your case the team you worked with were challenged to develop an approach and solve problems that weren't necessarily part of their core strengths or skill sets. - Philip 68 months ago
That is what makes soft skill traits. They should be applicable to different situations with different focus. Soft skills are cross and trans-disciplinary in their use. Sometimes assign tasked demand some soft skills more than other.. - Yaw 68 months ago
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Improvement of Soft skills is more challenging to do with knowledge which is closely linked with a person’s character, takes conscious effort, ongoing practice, commitment and self-development. 

Er. Jangyadutta D
68 months ago
You bring up a good point that it takes a conscious effort. A soft skill that may come/feel natural to one individual, may not come as easily to another.. - Philip 68 months ago
Emotional Intelligence is a term used in reference to soft skills which refer to personal qualities, habits, attitudes which is potential to make someone a good with requirements of academia, the ways you talk, you move around, listen and present yourself and behaviors which develop ones willingness and commitment to understanding the emotions of oneself and others. They are able to gain a furt - Er. Jangyadutta 68 months ago
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Soft skills are specifically developed through practice knowledge experience by which way there shall be ability to give little focus on repetition and commitment..

Er. Jangyadutta D
68 months ago
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Er. Jangyadutta D
68 months ago
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Emotional Intelligence is a term used in reference to soft skills which refer to personal qualities, habits, attitudes which is potential to make someone a good with requirements of academia, the ways  you talk, you move around, listen and present yourself and behaviors which develop  ones willingness and commitment to understanding the emotions of oneself and others. They are able to gain a further understanding of tasks and successfully engage with them, enabling them to gain more control over their learning. As well as playing an important role in the development of students’ overall personality and performance, soft skills also amount to good skills in communication; presenting information in a clear and concise manner; team-building ability; leadership; time management; group discussions; and interviews and interpersonal skills. 

Er. Jangyadutta D
68 months ago

Have some input?