The Hard sell on soft skills

There has been a hard sell on the soft skills by both employers and professional bodies for at a least a decade, although recommendations of inclusions of soft skills go back a century. Yet the term soft skills in itself represents a devaluing of the skill set to those in hard core technical disciplines. Why are these skills so important today to these hard core disciplines? Why do professional bodies include them in their list of graduate attributes, and in at least the case of the engineering profession, why are they such a high proportion of the graduate attributes? The answer lies in the actual role that professionals perform in the workplace, as opposed to the environment of the academic world where they traditionally learn. Reflections of engineering students returning from work placements to their academic studies indicate that an integrated curriculum that develops hard and soft skills concurrently adds more than tokenism to the development of these graduate attributes. Central Queensland University has demonstrated how a transdisciplinary approach can achieve this goal and achieve the hard sell to the employers and students alike.