Soft Skills Development Programmes for Distance Learners: Future Perspectives

Abstract

The contemporary needs of our society dictate a change in the education system towards catering to these needs. Today India is grappling with the issue of unemployment because of lack of skill development of its vast human resources. Laudable efforts have been made to develop hard skills, but the efforts in developing soft skills still need a lot of boost. In the present-day job scenario, there is an increasing requirement of soft skills. It has been reported that about 47 per cent of the graduates are unemployable due to their insufficient communication and cognition skills. The higher education system in India should understand that the need of the hour is to equip the learners with the soft skills necessary for gaining employment or set
up their own enterprise. The study attempts to elucidate the innovative pedagogies and technologies that could be employed to offer these programmes and proposes a broad-based implementation framework. The findings of this study are expected to throw light on how to innovatively design soft skills development programmes and offer them to the distance learners.