Improving Soft Skills of students to make them employable

Abstract This paper makes a survey of the importance of soft skills in students' lives both at college and after college. It discusses how soft skills like leadership, decision-making, conflict resolution, negotiation, communication, creativity and presentation skills complement hard skills, which are the technical requirements of a job the student is trained to do to put him in the drivers' seat during and even after the interview. Everincreasing global competition and the varying nature of most technical professions have made soft skills more than simply a prerequisite. It is of high importance for every student to acquire adequate skills beyond academic or technical knowledge. In this paper an effort has been made to guide students of North Bengal to put strides in the right direction to improve their employability chances in the job market in this LPG era. Remedial approaches to training as well as polishing soft skills have also been the focal point of the paper. The paper also exhorts educators, with all due respect, to take special responsibility regarding soft skills, because during students' college time, educators have major influence on the development of their students' soft skills. Embedding the training of soft skills into hard skills courses is a very effective and efficient method of achieving both an attractive way of teaching a particular content and an enhancement of soft skills. Soft skills fulfill an important role in shaping an individual's personality