Selected quotes
“The academic sector usually distinguishes between general skills and specific skills, based on the number of companies where they are applicable. General skills are those that increase the value of a person across the labour market, i.e. in companies, sectors and occupations. On the other hand, specific skills increase the value of a person only within the company where he/she has acquired it; leaving the company leads to devaluation of all the specific skills since they do not apply in other companies, sectors and occupations (Becker 1993). The existence of purely general or purely specific forms of skills, i.e. their extreme forms as described above, are very rare in real life. Moreover, drawing the line between general and specific skills is made difficult by its depending on institutional and structural conditions of the market, i.e. on its extent or type of competition, as Box 1.2 illustrates. The distinction between general and specific skills depends on the context.

Business sector employers, on the other hand, distinguish between hard skills and soft skills. This division of skills is not based on the context, because individual employers are not so interested in external transferability of skills between different employers, but on the content of skills. The traditional meaning of the word “skills” as a whole range of technical, job-specific abilities that require training and instruction for a worker to become proficient or skilled within a particular job reference corresponds to the present understanding of “hard skills”. Hard skills are described as skills which are easily observed and/or measured, easily trained and closely connected with knowledge; e.g., specific technical knowledge, ICT skills, knowledge of laws, rules and regulations. Rapid changes in the structure of economies, apparent mainly as part of service sector expansion, together with organisational changes of work and technological progress, have boosted the demand for certain non-job specific skills related to the ability to operate effectively in the workplace either alone or with others. These skills are usually referred to as behavioural or soft skills (Garg, Lather, Vikas 2008), and can be described as intangible skill which are hardly measurable and are closely connected with attitudes; e.g., communication, creativity, team work, conflict management, time management, making presentations and negotiating and leadership. (For an overview of general perception of hard skills and soft skills, see Appendix 5.2.) Distinctions between skills according to their content (i.e. hard skills and soft skills) and according to their context (i.e. general skills and specific skills) are complementary. It is possible to distinguish 4 types of skills according to their characteristics, as Table 1.1 shows.

Note: Soft skills, although they can theoretically be both generic and specific, are always described as perfectly generic in relevant literature.

{Note of the TVETipedia team: A full list of skills following this taxonomy is available on the annexe 7.1 of the study. The annexes are available here.}

…

Transferable skills is not a synonym for soft skills, as confirmed by analysis of skills transferability and examples of job-specific hard skills which are transferable between occupations. Nonetheless, a substantial number of professionals perceive it as such (similarly to perception of the term competence or competency as synonymous with skill). For example, the ESCO initiative defines “transversal skills“ as a synonym for soft skills.” Extracted from pp.21-22;36 (in Part 1: An introductory analysis of the role of transferable skills in occupational pathways and fluidity of the labour market)

Bibliographic indications
“Transferability of Skills across Economic Sectors: Role and Importance for Employment at European Level”, European Commission, 2011 - ISBN 978-92-79-20946-8

Selected quotes
“There are two kinds of skills: Hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are the skills that people use to do a job. Hard skills are tangible skills that we learn in the school and utilize at work. Soft skills are intangible skills that we learn by personal development trainings and utilize at both work and life (Klaus, 2008). According to Malcolm Gladwell (2011), people who have better soft skills are taking the jobs, solving their problems at life in comparison to the people who have less soft skills.

Hard skills is a new term, emerged recently in order to distinguish them from soft skills. Engineering, accounting, teaching, fire fighting, cooking, sewing are a few examples of the hard skills. … The soft skills are skills people use to communicate, solve problems, lead, empathize, and think creatively (Wentz, 2012). As being a new term, there is no agreed definition in the literature. Most of the definitions are based on the functionality of soft skills, not the description of it. The uncertainty about of the description in the literature causes a small chaos. Especially in the area of trainings there are some skills training like “presentation skills” which is definitely and skill; and there are some trainings like “ethics” that cannot be categorized as a skills training. In this paper, soft skills will be defined as the skills that can be learned through training and make a better employee and person in terms of communication, adaptability and problem solving. … The business life itself provides a context to learn soft skills. Despite that business people will not like to see an organizational environment as a trial and error space. Communication problems, resistance to change, adaptability, and lack of self-confidence are not the problems to be experienced in one business. Businesses have already very big problems like responding to the competition, innovating, attracting new customers and not losing the existing ones. By the way the businesses prefer employees with the soft skills already acquired. So the right place and time looks like a place before the real business life starts, which is university. Acquiring soft skills at university, pp.46-48 (in “Introduction” & “the solution”)

“Soft skills or people skills are typically hard to observe, quantify and measure. They are a set of skills which includes how people relate to each other by communicating, listening, engaging in dialogue, giving feedback, cooperating as a team member, solving problems, contributing in meetings and resolving conflict. … Soft skills in the highly competitive corporate world will help you stand out in a crowd of regular job seekers with ordinary skills and talent. In many technical professions, the sheer focus of education and training is on technical topics related to a career or discipline. Students are generally concerned to master various mathematics skills, science skills and technical skills directly related to the specific disciplines they are planning to enter. Though this learning is essential to their success yet the fast-paced and global marketplace of today demands more competencies in soft skills. … Our education system has not prepared our graduates for this work environment. Schools and colleges focus almost exclusively on technical knowledge, and ignore critical areas like industry exposure and soft skills development.” Soft skills: Education beyond Academics, pp.1-2

“Various writers have outlined a variety of dimensions to represent soft skills. They include communication skills, low self-confidence, poor problem solving skills and poor attitude towards work, to name a few. … There has been an emerging focus on soft skills around the world in recent times as they are deemed to be imperative for organizational productivity. (Nealy, 2005). It appears that whilst the employment sector, perceive these skills to be taught in universities and higher institutions of learning, this is not the case in reality. The paradigm shift in the 21st century has forced upon the importance of soft skills and that it has become critical even in the technical industries…” “Are Soft skills Important in the Workplace?” p. 45 (Introduction)

“Non-cognitive skills are often termed as ‘soft skills’ and can blend into personal characteristics and attitudes (‘fudging’ of skills with behaviour) A broadly accepted taxonomy of non-cognitive skills is the Five Factor Model (FF) which includes the following factors: agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, autonomy, and extraversion. We classify the non-cognitive skills and qualities to a set of social skills and personal skills. They are weakly correlated with cognitive ability but differ in the inter-relational aspect – social skills are skills typically applied in relation to the need to cooperate and communicate with other people. Personal characteristics refer to personal predispositions that characterise how one approaches work tasks....

A general finding of our analysis is that the ‘ideal’ low and medium-skilled worker in Slovakia needs to demonstrate a considerable set of skills and qualities. From the skills analysed, aptitudes and characteristics, non-cognitive skills and cognitive specific skills were more demanded than cognitive general skills or appearance. Experience was the single most requested characteristic.” “Qualifications or soft skills ?”, pp.7;21 (from “Introduction” & “Summary of main empirical findings”)

Bibliographic indications
“Acquiring soft skills at University”, Melih Arat, Journal of educational and instructional studies in the world (WJEIS), August 2014, Volume: 4 Issue: 3 Article: 09 – ISSN: 2146-7463

“ Soft Skills: Education beyond Academics”, Dr. Prasanta Kumar Padhi , IOSR Journal Of Humanities And Social Science (IOSR-JHSS) Volume 19, Issue 5, Ver. VI (May. 2014), PP 01-03 - e-ISSN: 2279-0837

“Are Soft skills Important in the Workplace? – A Preliminary Investigation in Malaysia”, N. Seetha, International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences April 2014, Vol. 4, No. 4 - ISSN: 2222-6990

“Qualifications or soft skills ? Studying job advertisements for demand for low-skilled staff in Slovakia”, Lucia Kurekova, Miroslva Beblavy, Corina Haita, Neujobs working paper D.4.3.3 August 2012

Selected quotes
“Claims in the literature that workers in even low skill occupations must have greater communication skills, team working and conflict resolution skills, if borne out, suggest improved prospects for portability of skills and possibly for the transition of older workers between jobs and between a range of circumstances in the labour market.

Yet our research suggested that regardless of this literature and the rhetoric of employers, both hard skills and soft skills were expected of new employees. More importantly, employers set the bar for possession of both hard and soft skills by new recruits higher than they did for current employees, and offered fewer opportunities for training than their rhetoric promised. And this was compounded by a reluctance to invest in training for workers on non-standard contracts, due to lower expected returns on the investment in the short term.

Moreover, contrary to our expectations, our respondents rated older workers less favourably than younger workers on the possession of soft skills. In circumstances of reluctance to invest where the returns to training were not assured, the managers gave no cause for optimism for current older job-seekers. Accordingly, we did not find reason to conclude that patterns in recruitment and selection strategies will change readily, in light of beliefs about older workers’ skill sets.” Extracted from p.17 (in part 6. Summary “Recruitment and portability of skills”)

Bibliographic indications
“Transitions and Portability of Skills: Soft Skills and Task Specific Skills” Professor Ed Carson and Dr Lorraine Kerr, Social Policy Research Group, University of South Australia Strategic Planning Department, City of Salisbury, 2005

Selected quotes
“There are two schools of thought concerning the teaching and development of ‘soft skills’ (Moore, 2004): the ‘generalists’ and the ‘specifists’. The generalists first came to the fore in the 1970s and believe that soft skills are indeed generic, and can therefore be taught separately from content and applied to any discipline. For example generalist approach argues that the attribute of critical thinking is universal, so it can be taught independently as a set of cognitive processes then applied to any context. By contrast, specificists argue that attributes, such as the ability to think critically, cannot be separated from their disciplinary context. Knowledge is seen as fundamentally situated. From this perspective, critical thinking cannot be taught separately from a students’ chosen discipline/s as a ‘one-shot inoculation’ of skill development.

The debate regarding the nature of graduate attributes or skills has become more, rather than less fine-grained over time. There is disagreement even amongst those ‘relativists’ who sit in the middle of the generalist and specifist positions. Some argue that a generic attribute such as critical thinking needs to be learned contextually, but once learned, can be transferred to another context. Yet, more recently, Davies (2006) has argued that those on either side of the generalist/specifist divide must move beyond the ‘fallacy of the false alternative’ (p.179), by recognising the possibility of both general and specific attributes. For Davies, students should learn ‘general skills’ – ‘the principles of good reasoning simpliciter’, which can then be ‘used and deployed in the service of the academic tribes’ (p.179). However, it is difficult to see how the ‘the principles of good reasoning simpliciter’ can be taught in a context-free environment.

The specifist/relativist approach seems to be strengthening by the recognition that soft skills are much more difficult to be transferred in practise than hard skills (Georges, 1996; Laker & Powell, 2011). Laker suggests that this difference results from the fact that the characteristics of soft skills and the relative training requirements are different from that of the hard skills. Georges argue that teaching soft skills in the classroom is actually education not training. He makes a parallelism with trying to teach how to ride a bicycle while sitting around a table. ….

Billett (1999) notes that workers reported that although they learnt different things from both their educational setting and through their workplace experience, both settings provided conceptual and practical experiences. He emphasises that it is the variety of experiences, and not necessarily the learning setting, which is important in development of expertise. Informal workplace training and learning is very common as work and learning are inextricably interlinked (Harris, Simons, & Bone, 2000).” Extracted from pp.57-58 (in Part 2: “Soft skills teaching”)

“There are several and varied methods to assess soft skills, one system will not suit all (Dewson, Eccles, Tackey, & Jackson, 2000). What may work well for a particular situation and institute a may not work for another. The system of choice and it implementation depends very much on the activities and objectives, the target group, the course duration, and the available resources. …

When defining constructs for measurement, a key question that can arise is the degree to which any particular context will influence measures of the construct. …

At this point in the development of robust measures of soft skills, there may be more questions than answers to the issue of contexts. Some educators see context as amounting to an insurmountable barrier to measurement. They may claim that the item-specific variability is so high that sound generalizations are not possible. Or they may go further and believe that there is no such thing as a general construct, just specific performances for specific contexts as measured by specific items.

It is important to note that the relevance of these debates goes beyond the purely theoretical. The adoption of a domain general versus a context specific approach will have practical implications in the description of learning targets, progress variables, levels of achievement, and learning performances.

…

Different options will affect the grain size of the operational definitions and will determine the specificity of the characterization of the products and actions that are considered as evidence of performance, therefore circumscribing the domains in which is possible to make inferences. … The kinds of inferences that we intend to make will influence the evidence that will be collected. In this sense, a crucial area that requires definition is the clarification of the intended users and, tied to that, the levels of analysis and reporting that need to be addressed. The range of intended users and stakeholders will delineate the scope of the project, the characteristics of the data that needs be collected and, therefore, the methodological challenges that need to be met. …

Assessment models

There are several methods that can be used for assessment purposes. They vary widely, from quantitative to purely qualitative, and from having high to low validity and reliability to low. In this section we will present several such methods, taken from (Curtis, 2004, 2010; Dewson et al., 2000).

The various approaches to generic skills assessment are categorised as (Curtis, 2004, 2010):

• standardised assessment;
• common assessment tasks;
• performance assessments;
• teacher/holistic judgment; and
• portfolio assessment. “

Extracted from pp.122-123 ( part 3: “Soft skills assessment” )

Bibliographic indications
“Teaching and Assessing Soft Skills”, K.Kechagias, MAAS project (Lifelong Learning Programme, UE), 2011 - ISBN: 978-960-9600-00-2

Selected quotes
“Research shows that access to learning is influenced by organisational structures especially in relation to people’s occupational positioning and status within an organisation. For example, Ashton (2004) found in his study of a large organisation that, for senior staff, learning was expected and encouraged, their learning was facilitated within the organisation and their jobs were designed in ways in which learning could be maximised. In contrast the learning of more junior staff was predominantly task-focused and was effectively constrained by the organisation. Similarly the Scottish survey (Scottish Government, 2010b) showed that the ‘low-skilled’ workforce was the least likely to receive training. …

Whilst the courses we have investigated were specifically designed to address skills that employers have asked for, the manner in which they were introduced and the lack of embedding in workplace practices has meant that neither workers nor employers have benefited to the extent that might have been expected. Workplaces will not be successful if they remain static so encouraging the active involvement of employees is clearly in employers’ interests. However, as we have shown, the culture of the workplace needs to be responsive and offer integrated support to employees if this is to be successful. It also demonstrates, as Felstead et al (2009) have argued, that learning is not a silver” bullet to be fired to correct problems but rather requires a radical rethink of employer practices and policy responses so that ‘learning to work’ and ‘working to learn’ are simultaneously carried out and maximised.” Extracted from pp. 3;11 (“Introduction” and “Conclusion”)

Bibliographic indications
“Plugging a gap? Soft skills courses and learning for work”, Weedon, Elisabet and Tett, Lyn, 2013, International Journal of Lifelong Education. pp. 1-18. - ISSN 0260-1370