A Practical Guide to Soft Skills

This accessible text looks at the range of soft skills sought after by employers and provides a practical guide to developing and effectively demonstrating these skills.
Soft skills -- including communication, customer service, teamwork, problem solving, and personal management -- represent a major component of any worker's professional identity. This book analyzes major soft skills, including both inward-facing soft skills (how workers manage themselves to effectively perform their work) and outward-facing skills (how workers effectively interact with others and in groups). It explores how these skills are rooted in fundamental areas of liberal arts including interpersonal communication, psychology, and ethics. It provides an active learning pedagogy, including creative exercises and case studies through which students can assess their understanding of underlying concepts and their application in real-world situations.
The book can be used as a supplement for communication, business, and career-oriented courses, and it will be of interest to individual students and junior professionals as well as career counselors, postsecondary instructors across the curriculum, and professionals in human resources and learning and development.

Richard Almonte teaches Communication in the Centre for Business at George Brown College in Toronto.

1 Soft Skills in a Digital Age Part 1: The Background to Soft Skills 2 Ethics 3 Psychology 4 Interpersonal Communication Part 2: Outward-facing Soft Skills 5 Communication 6 Teamwork 7 Customer Service Orientation Part 3: Inward-facing Soft Skills 8 Problem Solving Orientation 9 Productivity and Work Ethic 10 Likability 11 Can Soft Skills Be Taught?