Touloumakos Anna K
Department of Education, Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Department of Psychology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece.
Front Psychol. 2020 Sep 4;11:2207. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02207. eCollection 2020.
There has been a progressively heightened preoccupation with soft skills among education stakeholders such as policymakers, educational psychologists, and researchers. Soft skill curricula have been considered these days and developed not only for graduates and as on-the-job training programs but also for students across all levels of education. However, different people mean different things when referring to soft skills. This review presents evidence to suggest that the use of the term "soft skills" has expanded to encompass a variety of qualities, traits, values, and attributes, as well as rather distinct constructs such as emotional labor and lookism. It is argued here that these infinite categories of things can be skills because soft skills research is primarily focused on what are the needs and requirements in the world of work. This approach is problematic because it assigns characteristics to soft skills, which in turn affect the design of the soft skills curricula. For example, soft skills are often construed as decontextualized behaviors, which can be acquired and transferred unproblematically. The paper proposes that an in-depth and embedded approach to studying soft skills should be pursued to reach a consensus on what they are and how to develop them because otherwise they will always be expanded before restricted (as they have become ambiguous) in their meaning and definition.
政策制定者、教育心理学家和研究人员等教育利益相关者对软技能的关注日益增加。如今，软技能课程不仅为毕业生和在职培训项目而设计，也为各级教育阶段的学生而开发。然而，不同的人在提及软技能时所指的含义各不相同。本综述提供的证据表明，“软技能”一词的使用范围已经扩大，涵盖了各种品质、特质、价值观和属性，以及诸如情感劳动和外貌主义等相当独特的概念。本文认为，这些无穷无尽的事物类别可以被视为技能，因为软技能研究主要关注的是职场中的需求和要求。这种方法存在问题，因为它赋予了软技能某些特征，进而影响软技能课程的设计。例如，软技能通常被理解为脱离情境的行为，可以毫无问题地习得和迁移。本文建议，应该采用深入且嵌入式的方法来研究软技能，以便就软技能是什么以及如何培养它们达成共识，否则软技能的含义和定义将总是在受到限制（因为它们已经变得模糊不清）之前不断扩展。
