The results of a recent poll revealed that 42% of businesses feel it is not their responsibility to teach their employees about soft skills. At the same time, academia also does not feel that soft skills are important enough to be added to an already crammed curriculum. I have been involved in the business advisory committee for all 112 community colleges in California and I can report that almost all the businesses represented request soft skills at some point in time. So how is this problem solved? First, let’s look at business. There is a story about a conversation between the CFO and CEO of a local company discussing training: The CFO said “What if we train them and they leave?” to which the CEO replied, “What if we don’t and they stay?” Every business has to make the decision to train or not to train. It is a little late to blame colleges and trade schools for their lack of soft skills training when the staff is now working for you. If you want better people, this is the time to start training. I know a lot of you are saying “we can barely get our jobs done, how can we take time to do training?” Like any other project, you decide to do it and make time. With available online classes, you can present them at lunch time, also known as brown bag seminars, or after hours. Our Job Readiness online video program has a running time of three hours and 30 minutes. You only have to train your staff that is currently experiencing difficulties with their soft skills. Finally, modify your on-boarding program to add the job readiness program. In no time whatsoever you will have all new –and- established personnel up to date. Now looking at the academia side, their problems seem to be two-fold; first believing that soft skills (job readiness) really are necessary and second, if so, how to add it to an already crammed curriculum. By listening to your business advisors, you too should be convinced soft skills are needed in your curriculum. (After all, this is why you have advisory meetings isn’t it?) Once again, the ability to teach on-line classes can help work into a full curriculum. Our online classes are self taught and all the instructor has to do is to be a moderator. With businesses and academia/trade schools working together, we can solve the lack of soft skills in the workplace today which will serve to increase profits and improve the quality of our workforce. Jim Stedt is a partner at The Business SoftSkills Company (GetSoftSkillsNow.Com) located in Santa Ana, California. They provide job readiness and workforce success videos for education, business, prisons and individual use. Training is available online, on DVD, or through an affiliate program. These products are the most complete and concise soft skills training packages now available for the price of an average college textbook.
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