Do B-Schools Train Students Adequately In Soft Skills

Nearly 300,000 seats are offered by over 3,000 business schools in India. That makes it an awfully big range of B-Schools and an even bigger range of students on which to generalize my observations. Whatever I say will not apply to some Schools and some students.Soft skills refer to personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that characterize relationships with other people. This is also referred to as Emotional Quotient or EQ in a person. They say IQ gets you hired but EQ gets you promoted.If we think that the employers want the fresh hires from B-Schools to have soft skills, then we have to build that assessment into the entrance exams and also allocate time and resources in the curriculum to develop them.Entrance Tests to B-Schools: The entrance exams mainly test for analytical skills and number crunching. They test for vocabulary. The test takers have for generations responded to this challenge by memorizing a list of words and solving puzzles that are commonly used in entrance exams. Some Schools assess soft skills through group discussions or panel interviews, but the admission decision is heavily driven by the written exam. The current admissions process does not test for soft skills as much as it does for analytical prowess. If the B-School students need to have soft skills, then assess for that during entrance.Why Can’t They Be Taught in B-School: The formal curriculum puts more weightage on giving functional knowledge like Marketing, Finance, Sales etc. One could argue that the process of living and working with a diverse set of students builds soft skills. The curriculum of most B-Schools is designed to get students to work in group assignments, present ideas and pick up skills of working with others to accomplish common tasks. That is probably not enough to hone one’s soft skills.How Can We Teach Soft Skills: The bigger question to ask is – what is the best way to build one’s soft skills? Soft skills have to be put in two broad buckets:1. Interpersonal Skills: These are skills that help us work with others. Some of these like global etiquette can be taught in a classroom. Some others like negotiation, conflict resolution can be taught by watching others. Some skills like motivating others are hard to teach in a classroom but can be learnt by reflecting on one’s experiences. One can learn to get better at it based on practice and feedback.Most B-Schools offer courses in communication skills. The assignments provide opportunities to the students to present ideas to others. But communication skills involve knowing not just the language and its grammar, but how to use it keeping in mind the audience and the context. It is the latter element that takes years of practice and coaching to become skillful. People can be coached on how to present ideas to suit the audience, the occasion and the time available.Many interpersonal skills can be learnt at least partly in the classroom. But to really sharpen these skills, it is important to be coached by experts. Designing “immersion experiences” for students to work on social entrepreneurship projects can build soft skills faster than any classroom course can.2. Intrapersonal Skills: Our response to stress, the energy level we display, our ability to trust others are some examples of intrapersonal skills. These are developed from early childhood experiences and are much harder to change. This takes self awareness and consistent effort over time to change. These are skills one has to assess during hiring because they are very difficult to develop and train. The B-Schools that offer courses that build self-awareness are doing the best they can to impact these skills. Beyond this it depends on the perseverance and resilience of the individual to develop these skills. By the way, perseverance and resilience are also part of the list of intrapersonal skills – hard to develop.Taking a class on leadership skills does not make someone a leader. Neither does reading a book on dieting make someone thin. People hone their soft skills over a lifetime through years of practice and coaching. Some B-Schools provide the theoretical base in teaching their students interpersonal skills through subjects like organizational behavior. Some invite industry experts to coach students. Doing assignments that require students to work in groups teaches them important lessons in team building. Most B-Schools students are fairly tech savvy. Is there any way in which the students will come in as “finished products” that need no soft skills training? I don’t think so. That is why organizations need to run classes to develop soft skills of all their employees – not just the fresh hires from B-School.--------------------------Read the original piece in Businessworld magazine on 16 June 2012 <click here>