Soft Skills as an Assessed Course Component: An Abstract

As expectations grow for students to gain “real world” experiences during their college careers, faculty members must be creative to integrate transformational activities into their curriculum to close the gap between what employers are looking for and what higher education provides. Every year, LinkedIn compiles data and survey results to report the most in demand hard skills and soft skills (business.linkedin.com). This report alone speaks to the importance of soft skills, with the 2018 report emphasizing leadership, communication, collaboration, and time management. Further, a PwC report stated that 77% of CEOs believed lack of soft skills was the biggest threat to business (www.pwc.com). As millennials and digital natives enter the workforce, there needs to be an increasing focus on developing the soft skills of the current generation of college graduates (e.g., Tulgan 2016). A review of the literature in marketing education reveals little if no focus on implementing soft skills into college classroom as an assessed means to prepare students for their transition to the workforce. Despite a certain level of innateness, soft skills can be taught, as evidenced by the countless courses on LinkedIn Learning and Udemy. In a survey of business executives, soft skill attributes included communication, courtesy, flexibility, integrity, interpersonal skills, attitude, professionalism, responsibility, teamwork, and work ethic (Robles 2012). In this paper, we advocate to focus on these attributes by adding soft skills as a course component and encouraging its use as displayed through attitudes, behaviors, and communications throughout the semester.