White Paper on Soft Skills: Personality Development. Writing Skills, File Handling
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Wikipedia
Soft skills, also known as power skills, common skills or core skills, are skills applicable to all professions. These include critical thinking, problem solving, public speaking, professional writing, teamwork, digital literacy, leadership, professional attitude, work ethic, career management and intercultural fluency. This is in contrast to hard skills, which are specific to individual professions.
The word “skill” highlights the practical function. The term alone has a broad meaning, and describes a particular ability to complete tasks ranging from easier ones like learning how to kick a ball to harder ones like learning to be creative. In this specific instance, the word “skill” has to be interpreted as the ability to master hardly controlled actions.
The term “soft skills” was created by the U.S. Army in the late 1960s. It refers to any skill that does not employ the use of machinery. The military realized that many important activities were included within this category, and in fact, the social skills necessary to lead groups, motivate soldiers, and win wars were encompassed by skills they had not yet catalogued or fully studied. Since 1959, the U.S. Army has been investing a considerable amount of resources into technology-based development of training procedures. In 1968 the U.S. Army officially introduced a training doctrine known as “Systems Engineering of Training” covered in the document CON Reg 350-100-1.
PG Whitmore cited the CON Reg 350-100-1 definition: “job-related skills involving actions affecting primarily people and paper, e.g., inspecting troops, supervising office personnel, conducting studies, preparing maintenance reports, preparing efficiency reports, designing bridge structures.
In 1972, a US Army training manual began the formal usage of the term “soft skills”. At the 1972 CONARC Soft Skills Conference, Dr. Whit more presented a report aimed at figuring out how the term “soft skills” is understood in various CONARC schools. After designing and processing a questionnaire, experts formulated a new tentative definition: “Soft skills are important job-related skills that involve little or no interaction with machines and whose application on the job is quite generalized.
They further criticized the state of the concept then as vague with a remark “in other words, those job functions about which we know a good deal are hard skills and those about which we know very little are soft skills.” Another immediate study by them also concluded in a negative tone.
Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey famously stated that social intelligence, rather than qualitative intelligence, defines humans. Many industries today give prominence to the soft skills of their employees. Some companies now offer professional training of soft skills to their employees.
Soft skills are a cluster of productive personality traits that characterize one’s relationships in a social environment. These skills can include social graces, communication abilities, language skills, personal habits, cognitive or emotional empathy, time management, teamwork and leadership traits. A definition based on review literature explains soft skills as an umbrella term for skills under three key functional elements: people skills, social skills, and personal career attributes.
The importance of soft skills lies in the fact that they are not restricted to a specific field. These thinking dispositions consist of a group of abilities that can be used in every aspect of people’s lives, without any need to readapt them based on the situation. Their ductility helps “people to adapt and behave positively so that they can deal effectively with the challenges of their professional and everyday life”. Soft skills make people flexible in a world which keeps changing.
Interest in soft skills has increased over the years. The more research that is conducted, the more people understand the relevance of this concept. The huge amount of fund companies and worldwide organizations are investing in the training and development of this field shows this interest. The European Commission launched the program Agenda for new skills and jobs in 2012 in order to train and explain to young adults this new set of skills.
In the 21st century, soft skills are a major differentiator, a sine qua non for employability and success in life. The Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman claims that “soft skills predict success in life, that they casually produce that success, and that programs that enhance soft skills have an important place in an effective portfolio of public policies”. The significance employers give to the topic is shown by the fact that soft skills are now as important as GPA (once considered the most important factor in making decisions) in hiring a new worker.
The high request, and the broadly diffused confusion about the meaning and the training of soft skills represent two elements that can explain the lack of soft skills in the job market. Employers struggle to find leaders and worker able to keep up with the evolving job market. The problem is not limited to young people who are looking for a job, but also for actual employees. A 2019 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that three-quarters of employers have a hard time finding graduates with the soft skills their companies need.
“Hard skills include technical or administrative competence”. Soft skills are commonly used to “refer to the “emotional side” of human beings in opposition to the IQ (Intelligent Quotient) component related to hard skills”. Hard and soft skills are usually defined as similar concepts or complements. This fact demonstrates how these two different types of abilities are strictly related.
Hard skills were the only skills necessary for career employment and were generally quantifiable and measurable from an educational background, work experience or through interview. Success at work seemed to be related solely to the technical ability of completing tasks. For this reason, employer and companies used to hire new people based only on their objective competencies. This clarifies why nowadays people with good soft skills are in such shorter supply than workers with good hard skills.
The trend has changed in the last years, in part due to more businesses adopting a hybrid work environment. Hard skills still represent a fundamental aspect, but soft skills equaled them for importance. According to the leadership professor Robert Lavasseur, most of the researchers he interviewed in this field “rated soft skills higher than technical skills”. Studies by Stanford Research Institute and the Carnegie Mellon Foundation among Fortune 500 CEOs confirm this idea establishing that 75% of long term job success resulted from soft skills and only 25% from technical skills (Sinha, 2008). Another study found that 80% of achievements in career are determined by soft skills and only 20% by hard skills.
In employment sectors that have seen rapid growth, employers have stated that newly graduated employees possess a skill gap. This skill gap resides between soft and hard skills, these newly graduated employees possess the hard skills required and expected, but are lacking the soft skills.
Studies by the OECD in 2015 suggested soft skills can be meaningfully measured within cultural and linguistic boundaries. Such measures include a combination of methods that include self-reported personality, behavioural surveys and objective psychological assessments. These measurements can be improved by collecting data from multiple sources across learning contexts such as the school environment, family context and the wider community and triangulating the data (OECD, 2015).
This is because surveys can be subject to bias and having multiple sources such as self, teacher, peer and parental reporting can provide unique perspectives on student’s skills as well as infer latent personality (John and De Fruyt, 2014). In addition, anchoring vignettes is another method that can be implemented to lessen biases and increase data quality as well as improve cross-cultural comparability of soft skill assessments (Kyllonen and Bertling, 2014).
Personality development encompasses the dynamic construction and deconstruction of integrative characteristics that distinguish an individual in terms of interpersonal behavioral traits. Personality development is ever-changing and subject to contextual factors and life-altering experiences. Personality development is also dimensional in description and subjective in nature. That is, personality development can be seen as a continuum varying in degrees of intensity and change. It is subjective in nature because its conceptualization is rooted in social norms of expected behavior, self-expression, and personal growth. The dominant viewpoint in personality psychology indicates that personality emerges early and continues to develop across one’s lifespan. Adult personality traits are believed to have a basis in infant temperament, meaning that individual differences in disposition and behavior appear early in life, potentially before language of conscious self-representation develop. The Five Factor Model of personality maps onto the dimensions of childhood temperament. This suggests that individual differences in levels of the corresponding personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) are present from young ages.
The development of personality is supported and attempted to be explained by theories of personality.
The Psychoanalytic Theory of personality was developed by Sigmund Freud. This theory consists of three main ideas that make up personality, the id, the ego, and the superego. The three traits control their own sections of the psyche. Personality is developed by the three traits that make up the Psychoanalytic theory conflicting.
The Trait Theory of personality is one of the main theories in the study of personality. According to this theory, traits make up personality. Traits can be described as patterns of behavior, thought, or emotion.
The social cognitive theory of personality views personality development in terms of reciprocal inter actionism, that is, a perspective that considers the relationship of person-society as an interactive system that defines and molds personal development. Personal interaction with other individuals, society, and nature create experiences in which self-identification is organized in relation to social environment. In other words, personality traits are a function of complex cognitive strategies used to effectively maneuver through social situations. Furthermore, according to the social-cognitive perspective, cognitive processes are central to an individual’s unique expression of personality traits and affective processes. Through cognitive mechanism and social competencies, individuals interpret contextual situations to derive beliefs that guide their thoughts and behaviors, thus developing an enduring pattern of personality traits.
The evolutionary theory of personality development is primarily based on the evolutionary process of natural selection. From the evolutionary perspective, evolution resulted in variations of the human mind. Natural selection refined these variations based on their beneficence to humans. Due to human complexity, many opposing personality traits proved to be beneficial in a variety of ways. Primitive humans were collectivists due to tribe culture. The personalities of individuals within a tribe were very similar. The division of labor resulted in differentiation in personality traits in order to achieve a higher efficiency. Differentiation in personality traits increased functionality, therefore becoming adaptive through natural selection. Humans continued to develop personality and individuality through evolution.
Writing is a medium of human communication that involves the representation of a language through a system of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols.
Writing systems are not themselves human languages (with the debatable exception of computer languages); they are means of rendering a language into a form that can be reconstructed by other humans separated by time and/or space. While not all languages use a writing system, those with systems of inscriptions can complement and extend capacities of spoken language by enabling the creation of durable forms of speech that can be transmitted across space (e.g., correspondence) and stored over time (e.g., libraries or other public records). It has also been observed that the activity of writing itself can have knowledge-transforming effects, since it allows humans to externalize their thinking in forms that are easier to reflect on, elaborate, reconsider, and revise. Writing relies on many of the same semantic structures as the speech it represents, such as lexicon and syntax, with the added dependency of a system of symbols representing that language’s phonology and morphology. The result of the activity of writing is called a text, and the interpreter or activator of this text is called a reader.
As human societies emerged, collective motivations for the development of writing were driven by pragmatic exigencies like recording history, maintaining culture, codifying knowledge through curricula and lists of texts deemed to contain foundational knowledge (e.g., The Canon of Medicine) or to be artistically exceptional (e.g., a literary canon), organizing and governing societies through the formation of legal systems, census records, contracts, deeds of ownership, taxation, trade agreements, treaties, and so on. Amateur historians, including H.G. Wells, had speculated since the early 20th century on the likely correspondence between the emergence of systems of writing and the development of city-states into empires. As Charles Bazerman explains, the “marking of signs on stones, clay, paper, and now digital memories—each more portable and rapidly traveling than the previous—provided means for increasingly coordinated and extended action as well as memory across larger groups of people over time and space. For example, around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form. In both ancient Egypt and Meso america, on the other hand, writing may have evolved through calendric and political necessities for recording historical and environmental events. Further innovations included more uniform, predictable, and widely dispersed legal systems, distribution and discussion of accessible versions of sacred texts, and the origins of modern practices of scientific inquiry and knowledge-consolidation, all largely reliant on portable and easily reproducible forms of inscribed language. The history of writing is co-extensive with the history of uses of writing and the elaboration of activity systems which give rise to and circulate writing.
Individual, as opposed to collective, motivations for writing include improvised additional capacity for the limitations of human memory (e.g., to-do lists, recipes, reminders, logbooks, maps, the proper sequence for a complicated task or important ritual), dissemination of ideas (as in an essay, monograph, broadside, petition, or manifesto), imaginative narratives and other forms of storytelling, maintaining kinship and other social networks, negotiating household matters with providers of goods and services and with local and regional governing bodies, and life writing (e.g., a diary or journal).
The nearly global spread of digital communication systems such as e-mail and social media has made writing an increasingly important feature of daily life, where these systems mix with older technologies like paper, pencils, whiteboards, printers, and copiers. Substantial amounts of everyday writing characterize most workplaces in developed countries. In many occupations (e.g., law, accounting, software-design, human-resources, etc.) written documentation is not only the main deliverable but also the mode of work itself. Even in occupations not typically associated with writing, routine workflows (maintaining records, reporting incidents, record-keeping, inventory-tracking, documenting sales, accounting for time, fielding inquiries from clients, etc.) have most employees writing at least some of the time.
The major writing systems broadly fall into four categories: logographic, syllabic, alphabetic, and featural. As a pictography does not represent a language’s sounds, it has been argued to not be a writing system.
A logography (also called a logosyllabary) is written using logograms — written characters which represent individual words, morphemes or certain syllables. For example, in Mayan, the glyph for “fin”, pronounced ka, was also used to represent the syllable ka whenever the pronunciation of a logo gram needed to be indicated. Many logo grams have an ideo graphic component (Chinese “radicals”, hieroglyphic “determiners”). In Chinese, about 90% of characters are compounds of a semantic (meaning) element called a radical with an existing character to indicate the pronunciation, called a phonetic. However, such phonetic elements complement the logo graphic elements, rather than vice versa.
The main logo graphic system in use today is Chinese characters, used with some modification for the various languages or dialects of China, Japan, and sometimes in Korean despite the fact that in South and North Korea, the phonetic Hangul system is mainly used. Older logo graphic systems include cuneiform, and Mayan.