Abstract:

The new skills for future proffesionals are far from what is has been taught in the traditional classrooms. To be able to solve the future challenges; the professionals besides the hard skills and the technical knowledge adquired in the University environment, has to develop critical analysis, problem solving capacities, creativity, team work, communication and social skills, known as soft skills.

One way for enhancing these students soft skills, from the University field; is developing social projects to solve communities problems that are not able to solve by their own. These social projects created under a triplex model synergy between the university, the community and the private organizations are, a stimulating scenary for establishing a learning methodology based in the service; that indifferently of the theorical and practical knowdlege applied to solve the problems, it can be a powerful tool to improve soft skills of the future professionals thanks to the coaching and guide of the professors to reach solutions, that can contribute to improve a real situation of a community.

Since the 2015, the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of ESPOL have been working with the Community of Cerrito de los Morreños island, of the Guayaquil-Ecuador mangrove; with the purpose to improve the commercialization of the red crab, which the main economic activity of the community members. This project have been developed for 29 students of Economics, Administration, Communications and Biology carrers, with the guide of two professors and was structured in three phase:
(1) Market Study of the commercialization chain,
(2) Sustainable Marketing Plan, and
(3) Implementation of the Marketing Plan.

For the Market Study was used a cuantitive method to recollect primary data for the side of the production (men which their main economic activity is capture and sale red crab) with a total of 184 polls and in the side of the consumption (people which bought and ate red crab in the last six months) with a total of 384 polls. For the side of the intermediaries (people which buy red crab for re-selling) were done depth interviews to 6 persons.

With the input of the Market Study results and with a participatory approach with the Community, were proposed a Sustainable Marketing Plan of the red crab; and since the 2018 is being implemented through the collaboration of the triplex model sinergy.

In all the phases, the students were exposed to a real situation for solving real problem; where with the guide of professors, they were the “protagonists” for proposing solutions and their implementations; all of them related with some curriculum objetives of their carrers. These scenary fits to a Service-Learning Methodology which has helped to improve the soft skills of the students.

For assessing the improvement of their soft skills, the students were asked their auto-valuations about their soft abilities and of their projectmates; that jointly with the professor assesment, all of them showed a significant growth.

The results shows that involved universities students in social projects, with the collaboration of all involved parts; can be a tool for completing the professional education in soft skills and contribute to the improvement of the society from the university.

Keywords:

Soft skills, service-learning, social projects, market study, Sustainable, Marketing Plan, assessment, students, university.