I promised Ana to get her a list of soft skills tomorrow that we could begin to work up some storyboards for animations to help explain what they actually are, so I’m immersing myself back into the world of soft skills and I’ve found myself off on a slight tangent looking into how organisations currently asess soft skills of candidates and employees.

OnTheUp isn’t aiming to actually assess soft skills, well at least not in the traditional sense - we’re not aiming to develop something that allows you to get a ‘Grade A’ in Communication or Creativity! What we are aiming to do is to help people assess whether or not they feel they’ve developed personal skills and qualities while working towards particular projects/goals.

Our aim for for the user is to help them become more self aware of the skills and qualities they have and how they developed them - the underlying principal being that people who have a good understanding of their personal skills & qualities will be able to handle interview situations much more confidently (there are of course lots of other benefits but we’ll stick with this one for this post!).

Ultimately people that use the system will still find themselves in interview situations and will still find themselves being assessed by interviewers, so heres what I found on my delve into how soft skills are currently assessed…..

First some answers from a question posed on LinkedIn: “ How to accurately assess soft skills & potentials of an employee”

Ignoring some of the arrogant “I’m such an expert interviewer I know in seconds” type responses, the main suggestions are either tricky questioning “How did/would you deal with this situation” or placing people into a situation and observing them.

Quite rightly somebody points out that its hard to see past the ‘interview game face’, although I’d equally suggest that for many people they won’t react naturally or give their best answer when being grilled at interview.

Another interesting point made a couple of times is that ‘past performance is a predictor of future behavior’ - I don’t know how valid this is but its useful to know for people supporting young people that the experiences they help young people have and how they handle them could help give them an advantage in future interviews (and very relevant for OnTheUp).

An article on ZDNet also favours the tricky question approach. Whats interesting about this article is that it suggests delving a bit deeper - “Everyone you interview will claim to be a team player. Make your questions more targeted, and you’ll get a better sense of whether the candidate can back up that claim”

This fits well with what we’ve done to try and have categories of soft skills, it also emphasises the need for people to have had real experiences and to be aware of what they gain from them.

An article on Articlesbase suggests that to identify your soft skills you should:

“Think about which soft skills you use in your current job – what would your manager say were your strengths? These personal traits make you unique.”

Very useful and relevant - but what if this is your first interview? What experiences do you draw and reflect on then? (a good argument for volunteering and getting involved with community projects I think)

Something else I came across is something I vaguely remember from University days called Emotional Intelligence. An article on experience.com refers to Daniel Golemans work that “shows that emotional intelligence (or “EQ”) matters twice as much as IQ or technical skills in job success”, and the article goes on to state:

A study of nearly 500 organizations worldwide found that the people who scored highest on emotional intelligence evaluations rose to the tops of their companies. These star employees were more outgoing and self-confident than employees who received less favorable performance reviews.

In terms of assessment theres also the huge range of personality type tests available, although I share the thoughts about the value of these demonstrated in this post on ere.net