Fostering Students and Graduate Candidate Level of 21st Century Skills

Abstract—This study is aimed to examine skills of 21st century students including three main skills; soft skill, hard skill and competitiveness. Soft skill was classified into six sub-skills; communication, IT, numeracy, learning how to learn, problem solving, and teamwork. Ten indicators indicated hard skills, while competitiveness includes entrepreneurship, life-long learning and employability. Students’ self-report questionnaire was distributed to 600 hundred of the second to fifth year students at Science Technology, Humanities, Economic and Business, and Husbandry faculty. As many as 507 filled questionnaires were returned. The findings show that the overall 21st century skills of students were at average level. Soft skills, hard skills and competitiveness of students were at average level. All of sub components of soft skills and competitiveness were also at average level. These findings implied that the graduate candidate was not prepared enough with 21st century skills, which are very urgent to be possessed today. The institution must think about the new curriculum policy to embed 21st skills into teaching and learning process. Keywords—21st century skills; soft skills; hard skills; teaching and learning; higher education