Unit 5.

1
Soft Skills
 Soft Skill Development

… the spirit who is in you is more powerful than

one who is in the world ….
 NEED FOR SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT
Today, soft skill development (SSD) has become
extremely popular and is being emphasized in
various professional courses, including MBA,
engineering and civil services examinations, and in
several competitive, job-oriented courses as well.
 WHAT IS SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT?
Soft skill development can be defined as a
process of development of the human psyche and
personality so that a person becomes more social
and acceptable to society at large, including the
corporate world.
These skills are called soft skills because at the
levels of both acquisition and delivery, there are
individual variations and adaptations.
 Common Topics in Soft Skill Development
Communication, Desire for self-discovery, Knowledge of driving, Duty consciousness,
Internalization of criticism, Eagerness to learn, Conflict resolution, Etiquettes and manners,
Accountability, Fairness in dealings, Adorable behaviour traits, Fellow feeling, Alertness,
General knowledge and understanding, Amiability, Goal-setting ability, Assertiveness, Good
attitude, Awareness, Good conversational skills, Body language, Good humour, Catholicity of
character, Good level of intelligence, Commitment, Grasping ability, Common sense, Group
discussion, Compassion, Honesty and integrity, Courtesy, Humility, Creativity, Idealism, Critical
Thinking, Impartiality in dealing, Decision Making, Innovative spirit, Interpersonal relations,
Psychological stability, Interviews, Public speaking, Justice, Punctuality, Being considerate and
reasonable, Reasonable and realistic beliefs, Leadership quality, Reliability, Morality, Respect
for others, Motivation, Simplicity, Objectivity, Sincerity, Organizational skills, Smartness,
Perception levels, Sociability, Personality development, Straightforwardness, Positive
attitudes and thinking, Stress management, Positive reaction to outward stimulus, Team work,
Presence of mind, Time management, Presentable personality, Trustworthiness, Presentation,
Truthfulness.
 THE PROCESS OF SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT
Introversive vis-à-vis Behaviouristic Skill
The process of soft skill development is a rather convoluted one
where the introspective or introversive skill has to be transposed
into a behaviouristic skill that can be applied in the job market or
at the workplace.
For instance, you may have an inborn leadership quality, but
unless you apply that quality in a real-world situation, the quality
(whether congenital or acquired) remains introversive or dormant
in you. It does not then benefit anyone. Therefore, mere learning of
soft skills is not enough; it has to be translated into practice.
 THE PROCESS OF SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT
Introversive vis-à-vis Behaviouristic Skill
On the other hand, behaviouristic skills are
experimental and have been applied or are being
applied. Some of these skills are assertiveness, body
language, public speaking, courtesy, etiquette, good
humour, proven leadership, interpersonal relationship,
organizational skills, teamwork, management of time
and decision-making. These skills are manifested in
actual working or practice.
 THE PROCESS OF SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT
Cognitive Equilibrium and Disequilibrium
In the course of personality development through soft
skill formation, you come across two distinctly different
situations.
Let me explain them briefly. When one learns a soft
skill, one likes to apply it sooner or later. However, when
applying this soft skill, an individual may find that it is
not suitable for a particular situation or context, or it
may be contrary to practice.
 THE PROCESS OF SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT
Cognitive Equilibrium and Disequilibrium
Cognitive equilibrium, on the other hand, is a situation in
which you can deliver or convert your introversive soft skill
into a behaviouristic skill without any opposition or barrier.
The whole purpose of your soft skill is to make it fully
behaviouristic by minimizing or eliminating the obstacles or
barriers. The more you can adjust and adapt to the local
milieu, the more successful the delivery of your soft skill
would be.
 IMPORTANCE OF SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT
There is an old story of two shopkeepers who had their shops side by
side. They stocked the same goods, had the same quality and charged the
same prices.
However, one was able to sell more whereas the other was always short of
customers.
One day, the shopkeeper who could not sell more discussed this matter
with one of his close friends. The friend, who was an educated person,
analysed the possible reasons for this and concluded that it was his
friend’s curt and unfriendly behaviour with the customers that kept them
away and contributed to the loss. The moral is that you may have
everything, but if you lack the skill to behave well with your customers,
you are likely to lose them one by one.
 IMPORTANCE OF SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT
As a matter of fact, socially acceptable skills are
prerequisites for a good opening in the competitive
corporate world. Similarly, an employer does not merely
look for a person who will perform all tasks
mechanically like a robot. This is because effectively
dealing with people, which is an important part of
management, requires soft skills that have a more
important role to play than hard skills.
 IMPORTANCE OF SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT
When you have the right kind of attitude to life and
work, you can engage yourself in preparing for a
suitable opening in the job market, assuming that
you are not already there.
 IMPORTANCE OF SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT
It has already been explained that the soft skill
expertise will be an added qualification, and will be
a decisive factor in selecting the most suitable
employment and also for an effective entry in the
job market.
 IMPORTANCE OF SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT
In this context, a number of SSD-related
qualifications will be immensely helpful.
These are etiquette and manners, group
discussions, interviews, presentation and body
language. Nobody likes a person who has no
etiquette or manners.
 IMPORTANCE OF SOFT SKILL DEVELOPMENT
Although etiquettes and manners are related to
ideal human behaviour, there is a small difference
between them. Whereas manners are general
guidelines for good behaviour, etiquettes are
codified rules for conduct, especially at public
places or social gatherings.
HOW TO DEVELOP AND IMPROVE SOFT SKILLS
The development or improvement of soft skills (SS)
needs constant and consistent efforts. For those
who are not yet in the job market or preparing for
entry into the job market, you will do well to
identify the soft skill that is most suitable to you
and develop it to excel in the near future.
HOW TO DEVELOP AND IMPROVE SOFT SKILLS
Note that although SS comes as a total package, it
may not be possible for you to excel in all the
components of SS. Hence, there is a need to pick
and choose. And this choice is mainly dependent on
the profession you choose.
HOW TO DEVELOP AND IMPROVE SOFT SKILLS
Alternatively, a career can be chosen on the basis of
the soft skill that one is endowed with. So the
choice may be based on the profession and its
specific demand for a particular type of soft skill or
on the soft skill that one excels at. Whatever be the
direction of your trajectory, it is imperative to
identify your SS.
Know Your COMAD
It is very essential to understand your comparative advantage (COMAD).
You may excel in many areas, but that does not mean that you are the best
in all of them. Given a time frame, you can know your comparative
advantage by comparing interpersonal performance.
For instance, with a gift of speech, you can convince a customer about the
utility, price and after-sales services for a product within 10 minutes,
whereas other salesmen may take half an hour or more. However, suppose
that you are also good at presentation and you have presented a topic with
equal efficiency in 15 minutes that others have done in 13 minutes. In such a
case, your comparative advantage lies in your salesmanship, the monetary
implications remaining the same in both these instances.
Identify Your Soft Skill
The identification can be done in various ways. In
this context, one can take the help of family, friends
and peer groups. They can spot something special
in you that relates to a soft skill. It may be public
speaking, interpersonal relations and
communications or presentation. While identifying
your special soft skill, you must not be guided by
the idea of being good in the area but to be the best.
Practice Your Soft Skill
In order to master a soft skill, you need to
constantly practice it. Indeed, practice makes a man
perfect. The practice, however, should be
consistent, regular and motivated. Sporadic
practice will not help in absorbing and internalizing
the skill. Under some guidance, self-training can be
done if the rules and formalities of the soft skill are
already known.
Develop Your Career Based on the Soft Skill
As pointed out earlier, a profession can be based on
one’s soft skill or the development of a soft skill
may be based on the demands of the profession. For
instance, if you are a good speaker and researcher,
you could perhaps enroll in teaching or research
activities. Or if you have the power and confidence
to convince others, you would do well in marketing
jobs.
Permit Creative Destruction
While practising the chosen soft skill, you need to
willfully abandon the inherited or acquired habit that
goes against the standard (international or local) norm.
Destroy your old but uncanny habits, if you have any,
and replace it with the new or more suitable ones. The
old habit may be destructive or unsuitable, which
nobody pointed out to you earlier—for example, a
person who repeats “you know” several times in his or
her speech has to get rid of this habit if he or she wants
to be an effective speaker.
Join a Training Institute
For proper guidance and developing your soft skill, it is
better to join a good institute run by experts and
experienced teachers. Such an institution can also
contribute simultaneously to the development of the
qualities of team spirit and competitive learning. In
every country, city and town these days, there are
training institutes for public speaking, spoken English
and such other soft skills. If these institutes are
recognized and affiliated, their certificates can be useful
in the job market for new openings.
Educate Yourself
Soft skill development requires a different genre of learning
where the informal learning process may, at times, be more
useful than formal learning. Thus, ways of speaking,
standing, walking and so on may be learned more accurately
by observation rather than through books. Some types of
soft skills, however, can be learnt by reading, through visual
aids, examples and experience. Both formal and informal
learning can go a long way in the development of SS. But
keep your mind and eyes open so that you learn these skills
when an opportunity comes by.
Family and Friends
Family and friends can be very helpful in imparting soft skills to
you directly or indirectly. Thus, for the purpose of learning, you
need to carefully select a group of friends who are themselves
well-versed in such skills and can also impart informal knowledge
and training.
Similarly, some family members may be helpful in transferring the
required skill. For example, you can learn spoken English or say,
presentation skills, from your elder sister or brother, who has
undergone training or who is an expert in that type of skill. It is
often observed that a politician’s son becomes a good politician
without much formal training in politics. The importance of
heredity or environment, in such cases, can hardly be exaggerated.
Watch Your Learning Curve
You must constantly watch and study the soft skills
development in you. This can be done in two ways:
First, compare with others. Second, with intuition and
introspection, analyse what improvement you have made in
a given period of time. That is, can you do something
meaningful that you could not do earlier? Maybe earlier you
were not able to deliver a lecture before strangers, and now
you can. This, then, is a definite improvement. Progress,
therefore, is a function of continuous and repeated practice.
Change the Personality Pattern
For every type of learning, an extrovert type of
personality is more helpful than an introvert type. Give
up being shy. Be dynamic and always ready to learn and
emulate. A person who does not want to learn cannot
do so even if there are ample opportunities. You can
take the horse to the stream but you cannot make it
drink water. Similarly, the desire and eagerness to learn
must be present for any type of learning.
Prioritize Your Learning Process
As said earlier, soft skill development is a package that
includes skills in public speaking, interpersonal
relations and communications, etiquettes and manners
and so on. However, with time being short, you can
prioritise as to what skill you want to learn first. This
depends on many factors, including your job
requirements, personal needs, availability of facilities
and so on. The learning process, in many cases, needs to
be decomposed and segregated.
Feedback and Feed-Forward
While working on improving or developing your soft skill, give a demonstration
before your friends and colleagues and get feedback about the good points,
defects, suggestions for further improvement and so forth. In the next
demonstration, you should be able to make up for the deficiencies and present
better. Thus, the feedback will give you the impetus to feed-forward the process of
learning and this will definitely improve your performance.
There are four stages in the development of soft skills, which are as follows:
1. Learning through formal and informal processes
2. Absorption and rooting in the mind or psyche
3. Demonstration and delivery of the skill
4. Diffusion (spread it and become a resource person and expert in the field)
CAN SOFT SKILLS BE MEASURED?
In the measurement of qualitative data in the case of
soft skill, it is possible to translate those data in
quantitative terms in several ways. Several soft skill
components are not amenable to precise measurement
as is possible for quantitative data. Most soft skills are
qualitative in nature. But with reference to certain soft
skills (say leadership quality), it is possible to classify
the possessors in such a way that only one of the
following relations will hold good.
1. Qualitative Comparison Technique
1. Ax = Ay
2. Ax > Ay
3. Ax < Ay
[A is the soft skill and x and y are individuals].
In these cases, the qualitative differences can be known from
observation and examinations on the basis of questions and
from the opinions of an expert panel, such as in music
competitions. Another way of measurement is the
transitivity condition.
2. Transitivity Technique
Transitivity relation says that:
If Ax >Ay, and Ay > Az, then it can be presumed that Ax > Az.
[A is the soft skill component and x, y and z are individuals.]
The preceding two conditions are very useful in measuring
intensive qualities. Intensive quality measures the intensity
of an attribute rather than the extent. In the case of
measurement by assigning marks for qualitative differences,
you can only know the broad differences but not the exact
quantitative differences.
Ordinal and Cardinal Measurement
If you can know the exact quantitative magnitude of any soft skill
among two individuals, you can make a precise measurement in
quantitative terms. For instance, you can say that X is twice as tall
as Y.
This is called cardinal measurement. But for soft skills, you cannot
say that X is twice as good as Y in making a presentation. You can
only say that X is better than Y or Y is better than X, but you cannot
precisely say “by how much?” In many cases of soft skill
measurement, you make a ranking indicating “better than,” “worse
than” or “equal to.” Such a type of measurement by assigning ranks
is called ordinal measurement.
Ordinal and Cardinal Measurement
In the case of qualitative measurement by ordinal
ranking, you can know the relational property (or
attribute) that is asymmetrical. That is to say, if you say
that X is more polite than Y, you cannot at the same time
say that Y is more polite than X. After you give a ranking
according to marks (indicating performance), you can
classify individuals according to quality and get a scale
or ladder of this quality.
Scaling Technique (ST)
On the basis of differences in soft skill endowment,
you can make a measurement through the scaling
technique (ST). There can be a three-point, four-
point or five-point ST, indicating the quality of soft
skill—average, good, very good, excellent and so on.