Soft Skills and Emotional Intelligence

 

During the Christmas holidays, I read about a study done by LinkedIn concerning the skills most often required above all else by prospective employers.  According to the report I read, technology knowledge and use were highly prized for sure However what was most prized were what has come to be known as soft skills, the interpersonal skills that enable someone to meet and greet and talk to just about anyone.  The skills which I have often elsewhere referred to as social and emotional intelligence or what some refer to as empathy.

 

I used to tell my students in the Niagara University Teacher Education Program, one of the skills they needed in order to be effective was empathy, being able to understand their students and see the world through their eyes. That is what comes from social and emotional intelligence. We all know what it feels like to be in communication with someone who is not really interested in what we are doing or what we have to say.  Take that to the business level or the educational level and you get to understand what the problem is and how to solve it.  

 

One of the crucial ways in which we can help our students develop stronger social and emotional intelligence or soft skills is to organize activities that require them to collaborate together over shorter or longer periods of time.  Children don’t learn how to work together naturally.  Collaboration does not come automatically. That is why only children often find it hard to adjust at first to school. They have never had to share, or negotiate with someone else for what they want or to give ground in order to keep peace in a family or anything like of that nature.  

 

I can hear all kinds of professional educators complaining about the issues surrounding group work. That is what we used to call it. It is always easier to give students tasks and make it up to them alone to complete and then talk to those that stay off task. But it is far more natural for groups to discipline each other and to learn how to assign tasks according to the strengths of the members of a group.  Collaboration inadvertently forces young people to look at each other differently, as partners rather than competitors

 

We all know sports teams that are dominated by star players who still don’t achieve much because the stars have not learned how to share their glory.  Or people who refuse certain tasks because they think they are beneath them.  If you start to think about situations like that, and what teamwork looks like on the ice, on the court, on the field, and so forth, you begin to understand why soft skills are so important. 

 

Looking at this from an entirely different perspective, think about how Winston Churchill mobilized the collective identity of the British people in World War II and what is happening in the United States right now.  In the former, the English people knew instinctively that they were in it together, but in the latter, one half of the country does not trust the other half and so little to nothing can be accomplished.

 

There are more than a couple of ways to help children learn soft skills, but they must be taught or cultivated, even if you start small.  It is up to the adults in the room, in the school, in the family, in the nation to structure things in such a way that people see it is in their best interests to work together and the more they do, the better they become at it.  The technology today only enables us to collaborate in different ways and wise is the educator or parent who sees how that can be made to happen.  If we want to make things better in our world, the only way it will happen is when we all band together to work towards a common goal.  I am sure you can think of what some of those common goals are.