Soft skills: definition
Unlike hard skills, which are a person's technical skills and often called “know-how”, soft skills are more difficult to define. However, they can be considered as a person's “interpersonal skills ”.
The concept of soft skill is broader because it encompasses the qualities and aptitudes specific to each individual which allows him to evolve in an organization and to interact with others. Soft skills are also used in personal life, not just in the professional world.
Hard skills are also acquired throughout a person's career, whether at school or through professional experience. However, they concern all so-called “technical” skills.
Some examples of soft skills:
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Communication skills
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Listening skills,
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Team spirit,
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Self-confidence,
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Creativity,
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Autonomy,
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Adaptability.
And more generally, personality traits and social intelligence.
By their nature, soft skills are skills that are not specific to a profession, trade or business sector. As a result, they are transversal skills that can be transposed from one position to another and from one company to another throughout a person's career.
Although soft skills are inherent to each person, it is possible to develop them and make them evolve throughout life.
Assessment of soft skills
The assessment of soft skills, behavioral or social skills, by means of tests is significantly more difficult to implement than that of objective knowledge and hard skills. In terms of soft skills, there will be no right or wrong answer, we will construct questions that offer an imaginary situation, and we will ask the person to choose between different feelings felt, between different attitudes.
For each question asked, each situation mentioned, the choice of one of the proposals contributes to different axes of analysis. Are you more of a directive, persuasive, participative manager, etc.?
The tools should therefore make it possible to define the axes, and for each proposal to define and quantify its contribution to each of the axes. We see that the tools are similar to those of objective assessment, but with very specific methods.
Beyond the tools, the very design of a soft skills-oriented test requires real expertise: a succession of objective questions is not enough, you need a real overall approach where each question contributes to a target analysis.
Assessing soft skills with ExperQuiz
The LMS ExperQuiz offers advanced features for assessing soft skills.
The types of single soft skills and multiple soft skills questions make it possible to assess the soft skills of learners by assigning tags instead of scores.