Sangeeta Sharma Gajendra Singh Chauhan - Soft Skills: An Integrated Approach to Maximise Personality

Soft Skills

AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO MAXIMISE PERSONALITY

Soft Skills

GAJENDRA SINGH CHAUHAN

Head and Associate Professor

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

BITS Pilani

SANGEETA SHARMA

Associate Professor

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

BITS Pilani

Soft Skills

AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO MAXIMISE PERSONALITY

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First Edition: 2016

ISBN: 978-81-265-5639-7

ISBN: 978-81-265-8220-4 (ebk)

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Presently we have two incredible virtues as a nation: one, the youngest population in the world; and second, the vibrant emerging knowledge economy. To build upon this strength, we need a workforce suitably trained in soft skills. Several researches unequivocally support that people and their skills are very critical in order to sustain or make a business successful. The book is designed with a clear objective to identify the need of the present generation and empower them with the right set of skills to make them employable. Authors feel that there is a distinct mismatch between the expectations of the economy and skills of the graduates, calling for immediate partnership of academia and industry to fill this vacuum of soft skills in young graduates leading to poor employability. As a result, students have good theoretical knowledge, but they lack problem-solving skills due to lack of exposure to practical projects. The good news is that soft skills can be learned and mastered. Therefore, the training of soft skills for prospective professionals is gaining momentum, as 9 in 10 employers believe that graduates with soft skills will become increasingly important as globalisation speeds up, according to a survey by Talent Q, part of Hay Group.

With the bunch of soft skills, the book chips in to fill this void between the university curriculum and current industrial needs. The proposed book intends to work on core skills with practical approach based on authors own academic experience and research with management and engineering graduates, and also forms the backdrop of the book to bring valuable inputs for the overall development of the students. The book includes various stories, illustrations and cases from the real world to prove the argument: how soft skills do wonders when rightly combined with hard skills in life.

The book strategically divides soft skills under three domains: Social, Academic and Professional. Although they are strongly inter-dependent and complementary to each domain, the division makes it easy to represent the different soft skills depending upon their direct source of learning and application to the practical world. explores the skills which are of immediate relevance and utility to the market and enables the graduates to learn these skills along with social and academic skills to build a strong prospect in the competitive job market. These skills prepare the graduates to be good leaders and decision makers, to have critical thinking, to cope with stress, to work as team players and how to learn and unlearn at workplaces.