Soft Skills, Professional Practice and Ethics
Activities1. Define/Describe soft skills
2. Describe the term professional practice
3. Describe the basic principles of ethics
Definition
Wikipedia
Soft skills are a combination of interpersonal people skills, social skills, communication skills, character traits, attitudes, career attributes[1] and emotional intelligence quotient (EQ) among others that enable people to effectively navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills.
The Collins English Dictionary
"soft skills" is “desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude.”
Oxford Dictionary
Personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.
People Skills
- Ability to effectively communicate, understand and empathize.
- Ability to interact with others respectfully and develop productive working relationship to minimize conflict and maximize rapport.
- Ability to build sincerity and trust; moderate behaviors (less impulsive) and enhance agreeableness.
A social skill is any skill facilitating interaction and communication with others. Social rules and relations are created, communicated, and changed in verbal and nonverbal ways. The process of learning these skills is called socialization. For socialization, Interpersonal skills are essential to relate one another. Interpersonal skills are the interpersonal acts a person uses to interact with others which are related to dominance vs. submission, love vs. hate, affiliation vs. aggression, control vs. autonomy categories (Leary, 1957). Positive interpersonal skills include persuasion, active listening, delegation, and stewardship among others.
Communication (from Latin commūnicāre, meaning "to share"[1]) is the act of conveying intended meanings from one entity or group to another through the use of mutually understood signs and semiotic rules.
The basic steps of communication are:
- The forming of communicative intent.
- Message composition.
- Message encoding and decoding.
- Transmission of the encoded message as a sequence of signals using a specific channel or medium.
- Reception of signals.
- Reconstruction of the original message.
- Interpretation and making sense of the reconstructed message.
SMART is a mnemonic acronym, giving criteria to guide in the setting of objectives, for example in project management, employee-performance management and personal development. The letters S and M usually mean specific and measurable. The other letters have meant different things to different authors, as described below. Additional letters have been added by some authors.
Ideally speaking, each corporate, department, and section objective should be:
- Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
- Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
- Assignable – specify who will do it.
- Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
- Time-related – specify when the result(s) can be achieved.
SWOT analysis (alternatively SWOT matrix) is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and is a structured planning method that evaluates those four elements of a project or business venture. A SWOT analysis can be carried out for a company, product, place, industry, or person. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieve that objective. Some authors credit SWOT to Albert Humphrey, who led a convention at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in the 1960s and 1970s using data from Fortune 500 companies.[1][2] However, Humphrey himself did not claim the creation of SWOT, and the origins remain obscure. The degree to which the internal environment of the firm matches with the external environment is expressed by the concept of strategic fit.
- Strengths: characteristics of the business or project that give it an advantage over others
- Weaknesses: characteristics that place the business or project at a disadvantage relative to others
- Opportunities: elements in the environment that the business or project could exploit to its advantage
- Threats: elements in the environment that could cause trouble for the business or project
problem solving aspects
identify
Analyse
Action
Execute
