Soft Skills and Postgraduate Study

The purpose of this site might be to help you acquire the technical (or ‘hard’) skills required to pursue your chosen career path, but your ability to employ so-called ‘soft’ skills such as communication, people management and cultural awareness could be just as important in determining your professional success.

A person’s ability to handle the soft skills side of business is now acknowledged as a key element in making businesses more profitable and better places to work. As a result, most postgraduate courses recognise that while knowledge is important, students have to be able to share it effectively with colleagues or use it to maximise the efficiency of their work environment.

The good news is that everyone has some form of soft skills (and probably a lot more than they realise). You just need to look at how you get on with others, problem solve, provide encouragement and generally schmooze to realise that all these skills are transferable to the workplace. Even better, postgraduate courses will enable you to develop and hone these skills.

Increasingly, companies aren't just assessing their current staff and future recruits on their business skills - they are also assessing them on a whole host of soft skill competencies around how well they relate to and communicate with others.

An example of this culture change can be found in attitudes to workplace bullying. In the past, aggressive management behaviour was tolerated and even expected in some professions – now most if not all people would find it shocking and somewhat disturbing if they came across someone displaying such tactics and many companies simply will not put up with it.

Measuring a person’s soft skills is no easy task – it is not as simple as taking an exam. But in the most progressive companies, managers are looking for ability to communicate clearly and openly and to listen and respond empathetically.

They also want staff to have equally well-honed written skills so that their correspondence (including emails) doesn't undo all the good work their face-to-face communication creates.

Good soft skills include the ability of people to balance the commercial needs of their company with the individual needs of their staff. Being flexible and able to adapt to the changing needs of an organisation also qualify as soft skills, as do being able to collaborate with others and influence situations through lateral and more creative thinking.

In the new Ireland, the ability to deal with differences, multiculturalism and diversity is more important than ever, so understanding of other ways of life is another valuable soft skill. Very few companies are untouched by the ever-widening influence of other cultures and good soft skills facilitate better communication and people's ability to manage differences effectively.

In its submission to the Forum on the Workplace of the Future in 2004, the Expert Group on Future Skills Needs observed that generic skills such as literacy and numeracy and key skills such as communication, team working, planning, problem solving and customer handling were becoming increasingly important in the workplace globally.
Although the EGFSN acknowledged that some improvements had been made in the delivery of such skills in the education and training systems in Ireland, it stated that more needed to be done to prevent a gap arising in the future. Among the recommendations made in the area of soft skills were the need for soft skills development to be explicitly taken into account in a national policy agenda; initiatives in transition year; the need for soft skills to be incorporated into vocational programmes; and the development of soft skills at third level.

The need for soft skills development at university level has been recognised for some time. In 1998, the Irish Universities Training Network (IUTN) held a seminar on University Teaching and Learning: Policy and Practice. One of the key areas where recommendations were made related to what key skills (cognitive, social and personal effectiveness skills) should be identified as part of all degree programmes. 

As a result, third level institutions are increasingly referring to soft skills in their course promotional material. For example, in the ‘personal development’ section of its MBA programme web page, the UCD Smurfit School says ‘an MBA can develop your soft skills in communication, interpersonal skills and leadership ability, while increasing confidence in your professional capabilities. There is also a strong focus on absorbing new ideas and experiences while studying with a diverse and motivated group of students’.

In a paper delivered to the Royal Irish Academy Workshop on Engineering Education in Dublin last year, Professor Patrick Prendergast, Dean of Graduate Studies in Trinity College Dublin referred to a cross-university survey of the medical device industry conducted with the assistance of the Irish Medical Devices Association where the respondents ranked soft skills such as communication and leadership very highly.

An earlier review of the Department of Planning and Environmental Policy at UCD reported that the department ‘has integrated a number of ‘soft skills’ into their courses, including team-work, presentations skills and basic design skills, all of which are to be commended’.

These developments are significant, especially when viewed in the context of the FAS report ‘Soft Skills Development in the Economy’, which warned that lack of soft skills would impact on the effectiveness of organisations - and ultimately the economy - over the long term.

‘The risk to the economy of underdevelopment in this area is high, given the expressed needs for ongoing innovation and creativity, new and more flexible working practices, increased team working and partnership, all of which have soft skills as their foundation for success,’ it reported.