What Are Soft Skills And How Do We Improve Them?

Soft skills are also referred to as character, non-cognitive or social-emotional skills. So these are important skills for human development. This includes a range of skills and attitudes related to personality traits, values, and knowledge.

What are soft skills and what do they consist of?

We are talking about a set of skills that allow us to perform better in our work and in our social relationships. So, unlike hard or cognitive skills related to technical and specific knowledge and IQ, soft skills are socio-emotional skills related to feelings.

As we mentioned, soft skills are related to personality traits, aptitudes, attitudes and values. They allow us to better communicate and interact with others in specific environments. For this reason, those who have learned and developed soft skills are those who:

• To be flexible.
• Able to work in a team and with a collegial spirit.
• Have leadership skills.
• Possess critical, analytical and reflective thinking skills.
• Be persistent.
• Be proactive, able to provide solutions and options to problems.
• Be responsible and involved.
• Be creative, curious and innovation-oriented.
• Being resilient people, able to learn and see the bright side in difficult and complicated situations.
• be empathetic.
• Quickly adapt to changes.
• Have good communication, dialogue and verbal fluency.
• being autonomous.
• Being motivated.

How to promote non-cognitive or social-emotional skills?

To strengthen social-emotional skills, it is important to integrate informal learning into the classroom. In other words, take advantage of educational moments that combine strict curricular formal learning with informal learning.

So this means connecting school with family, work and social environment, and planning educational activities to work on real, everyday problems.

That is why there are various strategies and methodologies for developing and improving students’ soft skills in the classroom. Parents can also do them at home. For example:

• Promote teamwork and collaboration among students.
• Stimulate dialogue, debate, discussion and negotiation as a way to find solutions to problems and situations.
• Also set challenges in terms of finding solutions and evaluating options, alternatives and consequences.
• Stimulate the search for and evaluation of information and resources to learn more about a topic.

• Transfer real life situations and problems to the classroom and work with them.
• To develop emotional intelligence in students so that they can control their feelings. To work on their worries, fears and own needs.
• Use the conflicts that arise in the classroom to work on empathy and diversity of opinions and situations.
• Finally, integrate ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) as a tool to promote the development of soft skills or soft skills.

Why is it important to promote soft skills?

In short, in a globalized society characterized by the widespread use of information technologies, we need an education that can handle this task. Therefore, in a rapidly evolving society, we need an education system that is able to train people who can and are able to adapt to constant changes.

To this end, training hard skills, identified with specific curriculum and academic knowledge, is as necessary as training soft skills. In other words, it is also essential to develop skills that promote employability and are useful for everyday life in general.

It is thus important to promote the development of social-emotional or non-cognitive skills from an early age, as these skills help people to have a positive problem-solving aptitude. Therefore, they have greater adaptability, because with these skills we can all learn from mistakes through better management of emotions and frustrations.

In short, soft skills are useful tools that enhance our ability to interact and communicate with others in diverse environments.