Why Soft Skills Training is Necessary for Professionals?

chillibreeze writer — Amitha Venkatesh

There are many ongoing discussions within the IT industry on whether newly recruited software engineers require ‘soft skills’ training and whether, it is possible to enhance their soft skills through a couple of hours of training, either in one shot or at regular intervals?

Technical abilities may be important to get good assignments in the initial years of one’s career, but when it comes to growing in an organization it is one’s personality that counts, especially on a large platform where people with similar technical expertise, proficiency and competitiveness are vying for promotions.

In a country like India, ‘soft skills’ training becomes even more important since the education system does not include personality development anywhere in its stream of academic curricula. Corporate houses are forced to invest more and more on soft skills training in order to groom their employees to present themselves in a better manner and improve their performance.

Nowadays companies recruit employees not merely considering their technical expertise but also after seeing how proficient they are in portraying their soft skills. A high premium is placed on individuals having both technical abilities as well as the requisite soft skills in the present, rapidly growing and competitive corporate world, especially in the IT and ITES sector.

Today’s software engineer in India is no longer restricted to his own area of work, but has to interact with various kinds of clients, locally as well as globally. More and more employees are going abroad on projects and assignments. Tele-conferencing and video conferencing has become the most common mode of communication. Webex is the most convenient way to communicate across places even within the country.

As globalization and competitiveness become the benchmark of any multinational organization, it becomes obviously important for employees to be equipped with good soft skills. This is all the more true for India being a prominent hub for outsourcing manpower, especially, software engineers. Software professionals interacting with international clients must possess good communication and negotiation skills, team working skills for having healthy working relationships, time management skills when it comes to meeting deadlines, leadership and multi tasking skills when it comes to heading a team, business etiquette for adapting to various business cultures, and so on.

In the IT sector, almost every software engineer dreams of getting an opportunity to work onsite on a live project. Any newly recruited software engineer dreams of climbing up his career ladder; from a team member to a team leader and upward to a project manager and so on and so forth. For this longitudinal growth, both within an organization as well as through one’s entire career, merely being tech savvy is not enough. One also needs to have an ‘all-round personality’ which is nothing but a synonym for ‘good soft skills’.

When soft skills have so obviously become important for any business, leave alone the IT sector and at all levels of management, then why is it that most companies abstain from providing training for their employees on these soft skills?

In most cases, the buck stops at funding. Companies are reluctant to allocate the huge sums required to outsource the training. Setting up an in-house training facility again calls for setting aside time and expenses to meet the costs involved in setting up the entire infrastructure required for enabling this sort of training.

Hence, the big picture is that, it is only the giant IT companies and MNCs who are ready to spend these enormous amounts towards training since they believe soft skills are essential for any new entrant. Most of the smaller companies think twice before investing such huge sums on their employees, especially when the retention levels are so low, more so in the software industry.

On the other hand amongst the software engineers, some of them believe in attending an IT finishing school for overall personality development, while a few others feel that it is futile to spend an extra year trying to learn soft skills, especially when companies who are genuinely interested in training their employees are never going to give up on investing in training their new recruits.

Although finishing schools are very much capable of reducing the investment of companies with regard to both time and resources, many large companies believe in having their own setups and curriculums and standards when it comes to new recruits. These IT giants don’t think twice about investing large amounts when it comes to a situation wherein their software engineers are going work on live projects and be seen as ambassadors of their company.

Indian software companies send huge work forces to foreign locations. Many of these people come from rural / small town backgrounds and become unwitting victims of culture shock followed by depression. There are many real life incidents of Indian software engineers venturing onto an international platform, unequipped to face major cultural differences and finding it difficult to cope with new etiquettes and behaviour in foreign countries. For this very reason, Indian IT companies must come forward and take the responsibility of providing training in soft skills to its software engineers in addition to providing technical training, especially considering the number of people they send abroad every year.

In other words, corporate responsibility should extend into ensuring that, this basic need of soft skills for newly inducted sets of employees to remain employable, is met in a planned and effective manner. Otherwise, the loss will be borne by both the employers and the employees.

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Amitha writes for chillibreeze.

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