Essence of Soft Skills in the Area of Teaching Profession for Employability :

Bangladesh Perspective

Abstract

In this day and age, the significance of soft skills has turned out to be the most elusive skills that are sought by the employers in general and educational institutes in particular. This is because soft skills compliment hard skills that exhibit a candidate's qualifications and specific professional experiences. Years ago, the value of soft skills had hardly been paid heed as educators were recruited mostly on their academic excellences and experiences in both government and private educational institutions. Soft skills must be given importance in educational institutions to turn them into more engaging experiences for the learners. This study sheds light on the real market soft- skills requirements in the teaching profession because it is believed that developed nations have redesigned their teaching methods incorporating soft skills to bring a greater change in learning outcome. As part of the study, 300 job advertisements in academic sectors in Bangladesh were evaluated and found only 55% of the employers seek soft- skills as job requirements along with the hard skills (mostly in Private sectors), whereas, the rest of the 45% is completely ignoring the candidates' these emerging skills. The Government owned institutions, which is near about 85% of the total number, vastly represents the ignoring portions of the soft skills. The study provides insights of ten different types of soft skills mentioned in the job advertisement for the teaching profession where communication skills are found to be highest in demand (23.22%) and ethical and moral aspects were found to be lowest in demand (2.21%).