Employers define the job’s requirements and write the job description to clarify the purpose, tasks, and responsibilities of the job. The job description also indicates the person specification in terms of knowledge, competence, and (soft) skills. Some of the required soft skills can be made explicit in a job posting, while others can be implicit as they tend to be valued anyways.
Soft skills are “transitional, transferrable, foundational” as they work for any job and most careers and are about how employees interact with others and attitudes. Having a good set of soft skills have become the discriminatory factor that distinguishes between workers having a similar level of technical expertise and/or certifications (or between AI and humans). Companies’ potential of growth and wellbeing grows with soft skills. Soft skills demand is expected to grow together with the digitalization of work.
Necessary to do this exercise:
Helpful to do this exercise:
Step 1 - Job Posting Analysis
Take the job posting description you selected for this exercise. Read the description and look at the language it uses. Highlight with different colours and shapes:
Are there soft skills that are explicitly required?
Why are they important for the job?
What soft skills you think that may be important for the role even if they are not explicitly required in the job posting description?
Why are they important for the job?
Step 2 - Job posting description writing
This part of the exercise is better done in couples or small groups.
Imagine to be an employer of a company in a field you are interested in. You have a vacancy. Refer to Annex 1 – Info sheet on recruiting processes and use the internet to find the info you need to
a) define the role and the person specification,
b) write the job posting description and
c) define the selection criteria.
At the end each group presents and explains its work to the rest of the class and an-swer to colleagues’ questions.
Background information and teaching material for guiding your students through the exercise or offering it in your classroom
Videos:
Articles:
Webpages:
