Soft skills are very important in the workplace today. These skills reflect the ability to communicate and interact with others. Their uniqueness lies in the emphasis on the actionable component. Most of the professional programs are now including courses on soft skills. Several methods have been adopted for documenting the learning and for assessing the effectiveness of various courses at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The portfolio approach provides an alternative mode of assessment, adopted these days to reflect the learning process, as well as to assess student performance. There are several benefits of the portfolio approach that make use of portfolios attractive to students, faculty and the administrators of various educational institutions.

Organizations, today, have evolved into places where people cannot function in isolation. Working in groups or teams is the norm in most industries. There are many organizations that do not necessarily design jobs on a team basis. However, they require a fair amount of interaction between people within and across functional domains, to successfully carry out a piece of work. The adage, `no man is an island' couldn't be truer, ever, than it is today. The serendipitous discoveries made through the Hawthorne studies are now accepted as a basic and universal tenet of life in any organization. In this scenario, soft skills have become an essential requirement to function effectively in any interpersonal relationship.

Soft skills are "attitudes and behaviors displayed in interactions among individuals that affect the outcomes of various interpersonal encounters" (Muir, 2004). These are skills that refer to the ability to communicate and interact with other employees in a positive way.

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