Soft Skills Youths Need To Achieve To Compete In Job Market

Alaul Alam :
Over the years it has been a growing trend in the job market that different job advertisements seek for the persons who have good interpersonal and communication skills. Not only that, the requirement conditions include that the persons should have problem-solving attitudes and time management efficiency and many more capabilities that cannot be attained merely by completing graduation and post-graduation.
Again, most students can hardly get scopes to enter their desired jobs due to the lack of soft skills. A recent survey has shown that four in five jobseekers cannot manage their desired jobs due to a lack of soft skills on their CVs. Things may be more frustrating for the job seekers when they notice that the employers get more emphasis on soft skills than hard skills the applicants have achieved throughout their long student life.
The reasons may be many why students lack soft skills. Many of us often criticize that our education sector is not making learners; rather it is producing examinees and certificate holders. In the whole education procedure students are prepared for examination and there hardly remains any headache to ensure quality education for students. Students, teachers and guardians are all emphasizing good grades.
The traditional role play of the teachers in the class encourages memorization culture which deteriorates the creativity of the learners. Studies show that in most cases the failure of soft skills development was the big class size, academic focused and insufficient training for the teaching staffs.
Things are also frustrating in enhancing soft skills of the tertiary level students although tertiary education is considered vital to shape up students with life skills. But what we see in reality that in most cases tertiary education system is unable to meet the needs of the society and the state. ublic universities are busy with opening many departments to teach subjects that hardly equip students with the skills required for job market.
Certainly, producing a huge number of graduates and post graduates is not enough unless they turn into skilled manpower. There is a gap prevailing between education and employability. The existing education gives priority to the generalization of education which hardly addresses to equip students with skilled-based knowledge. Again, the imbalances between the hard and soft skills are pervasive amid students which shrink their employment opportunity.
In this digital age there is no alternative to achieving communication and ICT skills. The job advertisements seek for the persons who have good commnd over Bengali and English along with ICT skills in the country. But it is very unfortunate that most of the job seekers usually fail to achieve these soft skills.
As an English teacher at a university I have seen many times that most of the tertiary students have poor oral and written competency in English language though they generally complete 12 years of English education as an academic subject before their coming to university. Studies show many reasons why students cannot achieve English skills despite studying it over the period. But the most apparent thing is that students and teachers are prioritizing English as a subject but hardly concentrate on enhancing communication skills.
Debates are all around whether online platforms are bringing possibilities for students. Obviously, students are getting benefited with the online resources but engaging excessively in online platforms may be devastating for students. It is evident that the students who spend excessive time in online platforms like to be more dependent on virtual activities than on real ones.
Certainly, these soft skills cannot be learned online. It is no denial that copy-paste culture has been so pervasive in the education field over the years. Many students are found to copy from the writings of others on the internet and paste on their assignments or any write up without acknowledgement of the sources. This mal practice drastically affects the creative faculty of the students and causes barrenness in thought-provoking.
We are really fortunate that most of our population is still youth. But we are not getting the expected benefits despite the huge youth potentials; rather we see that the unemployment rate is much more amid the educated youths. So, undeniably, our education fails to mitigate the frustration of the educated youths.
Experts claim that the most apparent cause of unemployment of the youths is their gap between hard and soft skills. However, many claim that insufficient employment opportunity is driving many youths out of their working opportunity but how far this argument would be accepted when we hear from the employers that they are not getting a good number of skilled candidates to hire for the available jobs.
However, it is appreciative that the government is investing massively in vocational and technical education. Apart from this, a good number of Science and Technology Universities have been set up in the country. These institutes are giving students scopes to be equipped with hard or technical skills but in many cases students lack soft skills which are complement to hard skills for becoming an efficient graduate.
Undeniably, the era of the fourth industrial revolution has begun with the introduction of automation artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), and virtual reality (VR) into workplaces. But human beings still will have the control over all these artificial intelligences. Without analyzing the situations using emotional intelligence, can we be able to come out with maximum outcomes of the forth industrial revolution? So, soft skills should be prioritized more to enhance every individual not only to create their working opportunity but also to ensure sustainable development in the country.

(Alaul teaches at Prime University. He is also a research scholar at the IBS).