Strengthening your soft skills
Soft skills are personal attributes that relate to how you interact with others and your ability to contribute to a positive work environment.
While hard skills are critical for getting hired, soft skills are just as important for career success and advancement. Soft skills encompass a wide range of personal qualities, such as effective communication, teamwork, problem-solving, and adaptability - These are skills that you can develop throughout your secondary school journey, such as during lessons, CCA and school-based activities.
You may learn more about how to develop softs skills here.
In terms of post-secondary education, a time when you will need to demonstrate your soft skills is during interviews - You may need to attend an interview as part of Early Admissions Exercise to ITE or the Polytechnics, DSA to the JCs or to enroll into The NAFA Foundation Programme.
Here are some useful guides for you to prepare for interviews and reflect on the strength of your soft skills:
Learn about how to prepare for interviews, the professional behaviour expected of interviewees and how to maintain a professional relationship after an interview.
Look through some possible interview questions that interviewers may ask to assess your soft skills. As you go through them, you can also reflect on and think about how you can improve your soft skills
This document shows questions that interviewers may ask to assess specific types of soft skills and the level of your interest in technical skills.
This is a list of sample interview questions for each type of course. You may use it to prepare for EAE interviews. You may practise answering them on your own / with your peers first and book an ECG counselling appointment for an interview practice.
You may also visit the following websites for more information on interviews provided by these polytechnics:
Growing your hard skills
Hard skills are specific abilities that can be taught and measured, often relating to technical proficiency in a specific field. Hard skills are important for gaining admission to post-secondary educational institutions and, in the future, are critical for getting hired for a job.
You can build hard skills through your subject lessons and through self-directed learning.
Here are some useful websites that you may use to do so:
Charting your ECG journey!
🤓 You may view the following websites to keep up-to-date with the latest ECG-related news!
🤩 You may also search for more interesting ECG resources on SLS MOE Library using #exploreECGsec
😇 Learn about the various post-secondary courses and pathways here: https://www.moe.gov.sg/coursefinder