Soft Skills Enhancement through Interdisciplinary Students Engagement

摘要

There is a constant need for graduates who possess the skills that are highly sought by employers and can contribute to successful business development. Successful activity of a specialist is conditioned by two categories of skills: hard and soft skills. When talking about hard skills, we refer to direct technical knowledge. On the opposite, soft skills refer to communication, team work, creativity, problem solving and other personal skills. Experts agree that beside hard (technical) skills, soft (also called people-) skills are necessary. The research presents the basic groups of soft skills an engineer specialist needs for a successful professional activity: basic communication skills, self-management skills, skills of effective thinking, management skills. This paper calls for the development of soft skills through the interdisciplinary form of the educational process in order to increase the employability of graduates. We considered intrapersonal, interpersonal and systemic levels of interdisciplinary students' engagement which are relevant to the soft skills groups. The appropriate organizational form for these skills development is an interdisciplinary project team, which facilitates the acquisition of the soft skills. In other words, it is necessary to imitate working environment in the educational process to equip students with the skills required.