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Understanding Core Soft Skills

Last year, I wrote a blog on how you can develop soft skills through hobbies. This current blog takes it bit further by providing ideas on how soft skills can transfer into various disciplines such as:

Communication

Be it digital, written or verbal, this skill is used to clearly share information, ideas, and decisions.

• Nurse: Explains treatment plans verbally to patients, documents care accurately in medical records and communicates digitally with care teams.
• Marketing Specialist: Writes content and emails, presents campaign results, and collaborates through digital platforms.
• IT Support Technician: Explains technical issues in plain language, writes ticket updates, and communicates remotely with users.

Time Management & Self-Regulation

This critical skill is used to meet deadlines, manage priorities, and stay productive.

• College Student Intern: Balances work hours, coursework, and deadlines independently.
• Project Coordinator: Tracks multiple project timelines and adjusts plans when issues arise.
• Freelance Designer: Manages workload, client deadlines, and focus without direct supervision.

Collaboration & Teamwork

This critical skill is used to work effectively with others toward shared goals.

• Construction Project Manager: Coordinates with architects, contractors, and inspectors to keep projects on schedule.
• Elementary School Teacher: Collaborates with other parents, teachers, counselors, and administrators to support student learning.
• Software Developer: Works in teams using shared code repositories, planning tools, and daily stand-up meetings.

Professionalism & Adaptability

This skill is used to respond appropriately, ethically, and flexibly in the workplace.

• Client Relations Specialist: Maintains professionalism with clients, even under stress.
• Human Resources: Adapts policies and communication styles to changing workforce needs.
• Healthcare Administrator: Adjusts workflows during policy, staffing, or technology changes.

Critical Thinking & Problem Solving

This skill is used to analyze situations, evaluate options, and make decisions.

• Engineer: Diagnoses system failures and designs solutions.
• Accountant: Interprets financial data to identify risks or errors.
• Emergency Medical Technician: Makes quick decisions in unpredictable, high-stakes situations.

Emotional Intelligence & Resilience

This skill is used to manage emotions, relationships, and setbacks.

• Social Worker: Demonstrates empathy while maintaining boundaries and coping with emotionally demanding situations.
• Manager or Supervisor: Responds constructively to conflict, gives feedback, and motivates teams.
• First-Year Teacher: Recovers from challenging days, manages classroom stress, and continues reflecting on and improving practice.

Students need to understand soft skills are everyday tools that are used across careers. Job specific knowledge may get you in the door, but soft skills determine one’s effectiveness, advancement, and long-term success.

Exploring Soft Skills Through Informal Learning

Some of the most enriching learning about soft skills happens outside formal professional development, and the summer is a perfect time to do that. Take the opportunity when traveling, volunteering, caregiving, or taking workshops to naturally draw on communication, time management, emotional intelligence, and adaptability.

You can explore soft skills by tuning into podcasts, webinars, or videos that focus on leadership, communication, workplace trends, or student success. TED Talks and brief video series are especially effective for sparking new perspectives without requiring a large time commitment. These formats are ideal when commuting, exercising, relaxing, or showering, and often feature workplace situations that illustrate how soft skills are applied in practice.

Summer is also a good time to casually read journals, blogs, and books from various disciplines. These readings can help show how employers describe skills such as teamwork, adaptability, and problem solving, and how these expectations align with classroom practices already in place. Even skimming headlines or summaries can generate ideas for future classroom examples or assignments.

By noticing when these skills are required in daily life, you can begin to gain concrete, relatable examples to later share with your students.

Connecting Soft Skills to Existing Courses

Where should “I” begin?  Review your syllabus and identify the (implicit and explicit) soft skills that are currently being introduced and taught in your course.  If you currently have students doing group work, they are being exposed to collaboration, teamwork, and communication.  Reflection assignments allow students to become self-aware and build confidence.  By acknowledging these connections, you begin to identify the soft skill development already happening in your course.

Using the approach allows you to make minor adjustments rather than redesigning your course.  So, in lieu of creating new assignments, revise the assignment instructions, discuss or describe the soft skills being practiced, add a sentence to the rubric.  Small modest changes strengthen soft skill development while preserving academic rigor. 

Aligning Soft Skills with Your Current Instruction

Teaching soft skills does not mean you need to add new assignments, redesign the course, or increase workload. In many cases, faculty are already supporting the development of skills such as communication, teamwork, time management, and professionalism through existing course activities.

The ideal takeaway is being more purposeful in how the skills are practiced within the structure of the course. The suggestions include clarifying expectations, adjusting instructions, or briefly naming the soft skills students are using. This can make soft skill development more impactful.

Using real‑world scenarios and workplace examples helps faculty teach soft skills in ways that feel applicable and authentic to students, particularly in fields such as engineering or computer science. When course activities reflect professional contexts, such as an assigning an engineering case study that requires students to work in teams and present design decisions reinforces collaboration, professional communication, and adaptability. Similarly, computer science assignments that involve group coding projects, version control, and peer code reviews highlight the importance of clear communication, time management, and responding constructively to feedback.

These workplace examples help students see soft skills as practical, everyday tools required to function effectively in their chosen professions, not separate or secondary to technical expertise.

Planning for Fall

For fall planning, don’t try to eat the whole elephant; just take one bite at a time. Try to do some small things versus taking on everything all at once.

As noted above, review your course syllabus and write down a few small ideas to try. This can include adding more “soft skill” wording, approaches, activities to assignments, projects or presentations. Another idea is to focus on one soft skill (ex: professionalism) for the semester and thread it through class discussions, assignments, or feedback.

Think of the KISS principle, Keep It Simple and Straightforward, as you start the process. Narrowing the focus helps keep changes manageable while making skill development clearer to students.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) suggest preparing students for their careers as a responsibility of academic affairs, career services and experiential learning ().

And when you plan for fall, don’t forget your LU campus partners. The Division of Student Affairs can provide insights into employer expectations and help align classroom activities with workforce needs. Advising may offer tools or workshops that support skills like self‑regulation, resilience, or academic professionalism. Be sure to reach out to industry partners to provide real‑world perspectives that reinforce the importance of soft skills in specific fields. These collaborations can highlight relevance for students while allowing faculty to share responsibility for soft‑skill development across the institution. 

Conclusion

By taking little steps to identify one soft skill to emphasize, making minor adjustments to existing assignments, or planning brief collaborations with LU campus partners, you can enter the fall semester with a realistic plan.

These purposeful steps can help you emphasize to students that soft skills are everyday tools they will use across careers. Using this summer as a time for reflection and planning allows faculty to support students while keeping the approach KISS proof and sustainable.

We appreciate your commitment to our students and wish you a restful and enjoyable summer.
- your Faculty Success Team 

References

1. 1

   Cheang, M., & Yamashita, G. L. (2023). Employers’ Expectations of University Graduates as They Transition into the Workplace. European Journal of Education, 58(2), 245–260.

2. 2

   National Association of Colleges and Employers. (2024). Career readiness competencies for a career‑ready workforce.

3. 3

   Abelha, M., Fernandes, S., Mesquita, D., Seabra, F., & Ferreira‑Oliveira, A. T. (2020). Graduate Employability and Competence Development in Higher Education—A Systematic Literature Review Using PRISMA. Sustainability, 12(15), 5900.

4. 4

   Romanenko, Y. N., Stepanova, M., & Maksimenko, N. (2024). Soft skills: Students and employers crave. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11, Article 182.

5. 5

   Villegas, C. (2024). A Systematic Review of Research on Soft Skills for Employability. Advanced Education, 25.