What Are Soft Skills And How To Enhance Them
Soft skills are also known as transversal, non-cognitive or socio-affective skills , or also called “soft skills” . And they are important skills in the formation of people, which refer to a series of aptitudes and attitudes related to personality traits, values and knowledge.
What are and what are soft skills?
It is a set of skills that allow us to perform better in work and social relationships. Thus, unlike hard or cognitive skills, related to technical and specific knowledge, and with the IQ, soft skills are socio-emotional skills, related to feelings.
As we have said, soft skills are related to personality traits, skills, attitudes and values, and allow us to better communicate and relate to others according to specific areas. In this sense, those who have learned and developed soft skills are people:
- Flexible
- Able to work as a team and with a collaborative spirit.
- With leadership skills.
- With critical, analytical and reflective thinking skills.
- Persevering.
- Proactive, capable of providing solutions and options to problems.
- Responsible and committed.
- Creative, curious and oriented towards innovation.
- With resilience, to learn and see the positive side of difficult and complicated situations.
- Empathic.
- They adapt quickly to changes.
- That they have good communication, dialogue and verbal fluency.
- Autonomous.
- Motivated.
How to enhance non-cognitive or socio-affective skills?
To enhance socio-affective skills it is important to integrate informal learning into the classroom. That is, take advantage of educational moments in which formal learning, strictly curricular, is combined with informal learning.
This involves connecting the school with the family, work and social environment, and proposing educational activities to work on real problems and everyday life.
Therefore, there are various strategies and methodologies to develop and enhance soft skills in students in the classroom, and even parents at home. For example:
- Promote teamwork and collaboration in students.
- Encourage dialogue, debate, discussion and negotiation as a way to find solutions to problems and situations.
- Propose challenges that involve the search for solutions and the evaluation of options, alternatives and consequences.
- Encourage the search and evaluation of information and sources to learn about a topic.
- Bringing real life situations and problems to the classroom and working with them.
- Develop the emotional intelligence of students to manage their feelings. Work on your own concerns, fears, and needs.
- Make use of the conflicts that arise in the classroom to work on empathy and the diversity of opinions and situations.
- Integrate ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) as a resource to promote the development of soft skills.
Why is it important to enhance soft skills?
In a globalized society, marked by a generalized use of information technologies, an education that is up to the task is necessary. In a rapidly advancing society, an educational system capable of training people who can and know how to adapt to constant changes is required.
For which, training in hard skills, identified with specific curricular and academic knowledge, is as necessary as training in soft skills. In other words, training in skills that promote employability and are useful for everyday life in general is also essential .
Thus, it is important that from an early age the development of socio-affective or non-cognitive skills is promoted, since these skills help people to have a positive predisposition to solve problems that arise and, with it, have a greater capacity to adapt. Because they are skills that allow us to learn from mistakes through better management of emotions and frustrations.
In short, soft skills are useful tools that strengthen our ability to interact and communicate with others in diverse environments.
