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Soft skills have emerged as the epicenter of study today, from being a peripheral
topic a decade ago. Professionals in the last decade were more concerned about their
domain-related skills, seldom focusing on the aspect of soft skills. Now, with the
shifting dynamics in the industry, from a compartmentalized setup to that of a holistic one,
there is an urgent need for all professionals to align their professional expertise and
move commensurate with the changing times. The need for this has increased
manifold, especially with the emergence of knowledge sectors like Information Technology
(IT), Information Technology enabled Services (ITeS), Biotechnology,
Pharmaceuticals, Training and Consultancy, etc. These new generation sectors have necessitated soft
skills as there is a continuous need of interaction between the various
stakeholders—employer and employee, company and client, customer and consumer, employee and peers,
etc. Moreover, all these service-based sectors have adopted an assembly line
type technique, where output of one department becomes the input for the next. This
has also brought to the fore, the need for an integrated management. It is,
therefore, imperative on the part of professionals to build up their professional repertoire
by blending domain know-how with soft skills in the right proportion.
The objective of this study is to understand the presence of essentials as far as
soft skills quotient and domain know-how is concerned. The study has chosen lower
level, middle level and senior level executives working in various sectors like IT,
ITeS, Pharmaceuticals, Training and Consultancy, and Manufacturing. A total of 30
companies were targeted, out of which 20 companies actively participated in the study,
whereas the rest backed out at some point of time or for various reasons. |
