Reading Datuk Clement Hi (The Star, 23 September 2007 –pg. N12) articles on soft skills even reinforce my belief of the essential of soft skills Despite the fact that what he had mentioned is nothing new, but most of us seem unaware about it.
As mentioned, our educational system has been always rather skewered towards academic excellence. Nowadays, however, having straight ‘As’ is no longer enough to help secure a job or give one a competitive lead in career advancement.
What carries more weight appears to be soft skills rather than brain power or technical skills. Academic and technical knowledge is referring to as hard skills. While the three areas of character, inter-personal skills, critical and creative thinking is known as soft skills, which all of them are essential to survive and secured in the workplace.
The soft skills enable one to perform better as he or she can communicate effectively, mange relationship, lead a team, solve problem and so on. Research by Stanford Research Institute and Cernegie Mellon Foundation involving Fortune 500 CEOs found that 75% of long-term job success depended on people skills and only 25% on technical knowledge.
The Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) in its survey on ICT workers in manufacturing companies in 2004, as reported in the third Industrial Master Plan, found that employees are weak in English unable to perform despite having an academic grades and are poor in problem solving.
Research also done in Malaysia and the finding was also point to one core problem which is lack of soft skills. As a result, there exist employment gap where there is an excess of jobless graduates and a vacuum of unfilled job vacancies.
Government comes to the rescue by being noble to retrain the graduates, where it main objective is to help the graduates secure job. The question is what is the purpose of our universities? Why can’t the professors and the lecturers teach our students about soft skills? Or these groups of so-called stylish and luminous people in-term of academic had forgotten about the necessity to acquire soft skills.
Soft skill is about people behavior. It is more on the mind set. It means one need to understand the fundamental of it. It is about daily life and the experience that one is through. It is about the creativity of one to solve the existing problem. It’s about on how to formulate simple yet effective technique to communicate well, so that the person can inspire the others. It’s the apogee of one character to make him or her out standing. And now, it’s time for us to learn and fabricate ourselves with soft skills.
As mentioned, our educational system has been always rather skewered towards academic excellence. Nowadays, however, having straight ‘As’ is no longer enough to help secure a job or give one a competitive lead in career advancement.
What carries more weight appears to be soft skills rather than brain power or technical skills. Academic and technical knowledge is referring to as hard skills. While the three areas of character, inter-personal skills, critical and creative thinking is known as soft skills, which all of them are essential to survive and secured in the workplace.
The soft skills enable one to perform better as he or she can communicate effectively, mange relationship, lead a team, solve problem and so on. Research by Stanford Research Institute and Cernegie Mellon Foundation involving Fortune 500 CEOs found that 75% of long-term job success depended on people skills and only 25% on technical knowledge.
The Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) in its survey on ICT workers in manufacturing companies in 2004, as reported in the third Industrial Master Plan, found that employees are weak in English unable to perform despite having an academic grades and are poor in problem solving.
Research also done in Malaysia and the finding was also point to one core problem which is lack of soft skills. As a result, there exist employment gap where there is an excess of jobless graduates and a vacuum of unfilled job vacancies.
Government comes to the rescue by being noble to retrain the graduates, where it main objective is to help the graduates secure job. The question is what is the purpose of our universities? Why can’t the professors and the lecturers teach our students about soft skills? Or these groups of so-called stylish and luminous people in-term of academic had forgotten about the necessity to acquire soft skills.
Soft skill is about people behavior. It is more on the mind set. It means one need to understand the fundamental of it. It is about daily life and the experience that one is through. It is about the creativity of one to solve the existing problem. It’s about on how to formulate simple yet effective technique to communicate well, so that the person can inspire the others. It’s the apogee of one character to make him or her out standing. And now, it’s time for us to learn and fabricate ourselves with soft skills.
1 comment:
It is normal for people do little or nothing at all about essential skills. It' s not because they don't know at all, but because of the mind set as you have mentioned.
Post a Comment