Umam Mustain & Shekh Moniruzzaman
Increasingly, employers look for requisite soft skills in the graduates they hire. Lack of soft skills can limit one’s potential to fully develop and may also hamper the implementation of their hard skills. Our current education system is more focused on hard skills rather than soft skills. As a result, when graduates enter the job sector they face a huge gap in what they have learned and what/how they are expected to do or perform. Because when a new employee joins a company they are expected to have Communication Skills, Interpersonal Skills, Teamwork Skills, Flexibility and Professional Etiquette. But lecture based learning doesn’t quite prepare them for this situation. As a result, employees may take too much time to cope with the job environment and responsibilities, and in many cases even lose the job before they can get any opportunity to show their hard skill capabilities. Keeping this in mind, a course titled “Certification in Employability Skills (CES)” has been put together using the Effective Neuralistic Engagement Model (ENEM) which ensures that the participants take ownership of developing the skills in themselves through brainstorming and activities that involve interaction with their peers. A number of pilot runs have shown that the course develops confidence in basic skills and critical thinking skills.