Identifying Soft Skills for the Social Innovation Camp
I’ve been starting to pull ideas together for the Social Innovation Camp this coming weekend. I’m already to think the ‘Personal Development Reports‘ will be more of a ‘Soft Skills Plotter’ albeit the measurement of development over time is critical so hopefully a better name will come up in time.
For the concept to work there are two key factors - usability and credibility. Credibility will take some time but one of the main ways of achieving this will be through use so I’m very much hoping that over the weekend I’m lucky enough to get to work with technical people who are able to make very complex things very simple!
In terms of use I think those that will find the system most useful will be:
- Young People - becoming aware of their skills and feeling confident to talk about them
- Practitioners - measuring impacts of projects and comparing different the outcomes of different programmes and projects
- Employers & Educators - understanding what soft skills are and who has what
So we’ll need to understand what soft skills are too! And then having worked out what they are we then need to find a sensible way of helping people assess them over time (and in a way that they understand and enjoy).
This isn’t something new to me - our kind of work has far more outcomes in the soft skills area than anything else and its always been a frustration that its so difficult (and questionable!) to measure the ‘journey’ that people have gone on. If you ask yourself the question “what kind of a person was I five years ago and what skills have I developed during that time?” - its very difficult to answer other than in terms of hard skills & experiences “I was a Supervisor, now I’m a Manager” or “I completed my Diploma or I did a First Aid Certificate” - but this doesn’t give a real insight into the person you are and what you have to offer.
Anyway back to what those soft skills are. I’ve been building a list and attempting to categorise them. This is based partly on previous work I’ve done but also I’ve been trawling websites looking at what Employers are looking for and also advice given to Human Resources Departments about assessing candidates soft skills (which are very vague!). Reassuringly theres a lot of stuff about the importance of soft skills and one thing I particularly liked was a comment that ‘Employers recruit people on the basis of their hard skills and then sack them on the basis of their soft skills!’ (as part of an argument for better recruitment strategies).
So heres the list so far and please do comment if you suggestions/changes/comments - at this stage all input is useful:
| Communication | Team Working | Organisational | Leadership |
| listening speaking writing presenting assertiveness computer skills |
leadership cooperating empathising negotiating relationships diplomacy sensitivity integrity reliability hard working Motivating |
Time management planning being creative analysing researching reasoning resourceful self motivated meeting deadlines Setting Targets |
Assertiveness adaptability taking responsibility integrity empathising listening reliability having vision self motivated determination influencing able to reflect Motivating |
| Willingness to Learn | Attitude | Concern for Others | Responsibility |
| open minded ambition teaching others Setting Targets |
Positive Outlook Ambitious Flexible Courteous Accepts responsibility Perseverance Motivated Self Confident |
Empathy Listening Open Minded Teaching others Appraising Motivating |
Taking a Lead Volunteering for tasks Honest Being Accountable |
The qualities listed within each category are not just ‘indicators’ they’re skills themselves. I’ve categorised them because part of the design is likely to include a ‘menu’ to allow users to focus on particular categories of skills that they would like to measure/assess.
Hi there
Reading this with interest as I’ve just picked up on the Social Innovation Camp information. This is something I’m very interested in and that we’ve been working on here, in particular related to Recorded Outcomes Targets and therefore being able to demonstrate a young persons journey.
A query would be where would “confidence” and “self esteem” fall? Many of the young people I work with often say that they have increased these areas. Are they “attitudes”? It would be helpful to have them as indicators in some area.
The other is around motivation - you have self motivated under organisational skills but is it also an attitude? I think there is a difference between motivating and being motivated and this again is commented on by young people.
Just a few thoughts and keen to hear your thoughts but WOW!!! what an exciting project!
I’m so glad you’ve written that Hilary - its always the most obvious things that get forgotten!
I’ve written about ‘confidence’ here before - we always say on our evaluations that if the only comment is ‘I feel more confident’ then the course wasn’t as good as it should have been - what we want people to say is why and how they feel more ‘confident’.
You’re absolutely right though and I’ll get both of those incorporated and also give some more thoughts to different kinds/types of confidence (I think you’re right too that they would best fit in the ‘attitudes’ - a ‘can do’, ‘can deal with’ etc. attitude/mindset)
Me again, I was reading some further info you had re this about individuals being able to rate themselves and weightings. I did some work on this some time ago with a young people involved on a long term 18mth project. They rated themselves against indicators at different intervals throughout the 18mths. What we found was that often individuals often rated themselves lower later in the project than earlier with some then increasing or not. The importance was the discussion around how / why they were weighting their skills in a certain area. It often transpired that as their understanding of a skill improved then they rated themselves lower in that skill. I’m not sure if you’ve thought of this. It was quite powerful for us as we thought there would be a steady increase in the learning of skills but were surprised that on a self assessment level this can and will go up and down.
Hi Hilary - yes we have similar experiences with some of the current assessments we use in our training. We use a scale of -10 to +10 so that if they don’t understand something or feel unable to give a rating (as is normal for new groups or people learning about something new) they can rate themselves ‘0′ (which is neither good or bad).
Even so its still the case that as people become more familiar with the process of rating themselves they sometimes also become more effective/accurate. Having said that there are equally people who can’t get past the ‘0′ is failure, and people who inflate their ratings.
Theres lots of discussion to be had on how these can best be overcome or taken into account. While we should aim for as credible a system as possible, the key purpose for me though is that through using the system young people will be more aware and more articulate about the benefits of experiences they’ve had. I think young people that are able to sit in an interview and confidently talk about and draw upon their life experiences are in a better position than those that rely on pieces of paper with grades & ratings - so the understanding & self awareness are perhaps of equal (maybe more) importance than the actual assessments.
Thanks for contributing its really useful.
Negative Soft Skills | The (late) Breakfast Society responded on 02 Apr 2008 at 2:52 pm #
[...] to start all over so in between frustration and brain overload I’ve just wasted a bit of time redoing the soft skills drawn up so far - this time though I’ve redone them as ‘negative soft skills’ - just for fun so [...]
A-Lex-I-Con » Blog Archive » Social Innovation Camp materials responded on 14 Apr 2008 at 1:15 am #
[...] “Identifying Soft Skills forthe Social Innovation Camp” at The Late Breakfast Society blog by Mike Amos-Simpson on 31 March [...]