Enhancing Students' Perceived Soft Skills Competences through Experiential Learning

Abstract

Employers now seek college graduates who not only demonstrate hard abilities, but also have developed soft skills necessary to succeed in industry. Strengthening professionally-oriented training in college degree programs by means of experiential learning and collaborations with the professional world may help students to make a successful transition in the global marketplace. Here we investigated whether baseline conditions may bias the interpretation that the transition to professional life through experiential learning (e.g., based on a real-life project linked to a collaborating company) increases students' perception of their cross-disciplinary competencies. Changes in perceived competency in 21 soft skills were assessed before and after no intervention by using a newly designed questionnaire with a 7-Likert scale. The sample was comprised of 21 international students enrolled in the double degree in International Business at European University of Madrid. Findings demonstrated significant positive changes after baseline conditions in students' perception of an overall level of soft skills competency. Specifically, key positive changes both in level and improvement of specific competences were for organization and planning, analytic thinking, negotiating capacity, and ethical commitment (honesty). In conclusion, we found evidence that experiential learning with professionally-oriented approaches need of strong (quasi) experimental methodologies that include control groups. Certainly, more studies are needed to elucidate the impact of experiential learning in competency-based education with comparison of baseline conditions.