Abstract:

Transversal or soft skills are a set of fundamental competences for college students, not only because they serve to complete the comprehensive training that a graduate should acquire, but because they are highly demanded in any working environment. They have been also considered both in the literature and in the design of educational programs all over the world. Despite that relevance, they usually remain shadowed: students are not aware of them, and therefore, they do not value their importance, even though their employers do really require this kind of non technical expertise. On the teaching side, educators find difficult to deal with these skills in their courses many times, due to their general character, that sometimes makes them hard to accomodate into the more specific contents of a course; furthermore, it is not trivial to find a suitable and effective grading system that fits the organization of the course without demanding an exccesive use of resources.

The School of Computer Science Engineering at Málaga University (Spain) offers four undergraduate programs (namely Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering and Health Engineering bachelors) which explicitly include several soft skills in their official study plans; such soft skills are related to oral and written communication competences, self organization and learning, problem resolution and adaptation abilities, team work and social responsability. In this paper we show the work developed at our School in order to have a better understanding of how soft skills are deployed across our four undergraduate programs. For accomplishing this task we have carried out two kinds of activities. On one hand, a thorough analysis about how the soft skills included in the study plans of our undergraduate degrees are being considered in the different courses that conform each bachelor program. On the other hand, we have run several surveys regarding the knowledge, importance and perceived level in soft skills of our students; these surveys have been run among students, teachers and also employers that usually collaborate with our School, in order to obtain a multifaceted perspective that considers the three main actors involved in the education of our students.

This paper shows the results of those activities. The outcome is that now we have a global view of the current state of the arrangement of the soft skills in our bachelor programs. Furthermore, we also have a better knowledge of how soft skills are recognized by students, teachers and employers. With this in mind, we are implementing a set of activities focused on two main aspects related to teachers and, primarily, students. In this way, we will improve the distribution, coordination and evaluation methodologies of the soft skills considered in our study plans. Besides, we have started to promote the awareness of the importance of the soft skills among our students, so they realize about their relevance for any professional career, and we are also improving their capacitation on soft skills via some specific tools, such as a collection of videos designed by specialized psychologists that students can access freely in the web.

Keywords:

Soft skills, professional career.