Learning How to Learn in a Real-Life Context
Insights from Expert Focus Groups on Narrowing the Soft-Skills Gap
Abstract
Abstract. The soft-skills gap – the misalignment between the soft skills needed at the workplace and the soft skills possessed by the workforce – is considered to be widening, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper presents evidence from two focus-group interviews conducted in May 2021 and May 2022 in Greece. We wanted to understand the factors influencing the soft-skills gap and possible ways to narrow it. Participants were experts on soft skills, involved in various ways and roles in the teaching, training, and evaluation of soft skills. They expressed their concerns about the soft-skills gap and identified aspects that involved employees, employers, the work environment, and the broader social environment. The idea of a constantly changing environment led to the conclusion that adaptability, taking the initiative, and metacognitive skills are most important for university graduates. This conclusion came with a caveat: Learning should take place in real-life contexts, and universities should find ways to embed educational practices in social and work interactions, both inside and outside universities, working closely with local communities.
There is a widespread notion that university graduates, while having developed the technical or hard skills essential for a certain line of work, lack the general intrapersonal and interpersonal skills required to thrive in most work environments (Cacciolatti et al., 2017; Succi & Canovi, 2020; Touloumakos, 2020, 2022). The significance of minimizing this gap, known as a soft-skills gap, is reflected in the forecast made by the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP), which predicts a rise of jobs in the EU requiring tertiary level qualifications, such as transversal skills (European Commission High Level Group, 2012). Nevertheless, the gap is considered to be widening, especially in the post-COVID-19 era (Michel et al., 2022). What does this gap consist of and why might it be widening? One way to tackle this question is to focus on the prospective employees and, for example, their unfounded overconfidence about their skills (Stewart et al., 2016). The focus on employees may also pertain to the fact that, as Generation Z, they were raised in a way that required little of them and was not conducive to developing critical thinking or teamwork skills (Tulgan, 2015). Another way to tackle the “widening gap” question is to focus on the employers and their needs, which should be better communicated to educational institutions for a holistic professional development approach (Singh Dubey et al., 2022; Succi & Canovi, 2020), or their extremely demanding hiring practices that present an overstated view of the skills gap (Cappelli, 2015). Yet another way is to consider the broader work and social environment undergoing technological, cultural, and social change (Edwards et al., 1996; Touloumakos, 2011).
From a social-psychological standpoint, a soft-skills gap results solely neither from the prospective employees, the employers or the working and broader social environment. More specifically, based on Lewin’s (1946) classic formulation, often taking the form B = f (P,E) (Behavior is a function of the Person and Environment), we should consider both relevant people and their environment simultaneously. But just as important is the interplay between the two (see also Reis & Holmes, 2012), which is rarely highlighted. Indeed, pertinent studies look at how some of the relevant parties view this gap in isolation from one another (cf. Tsirkas et al., 2020). By contrast, Hurrell’s (2016) study focused on the interplay between relevant parties. The question concerned how the soft-skills gap was formulated during the interaction between employers and employees. More specifically, Hurrell examined whether employees withdrew soft skills that they possessed because of disaffection with their employers.
A stance that lends precedence to the interplay between the person and the environment unveils the complexity of disentangling and explaining the soft-skills gap. This suggests that a full account of the (soft) skills gap, which considers all of the above-mentioned factors, is hard – if at all possible – to provide. This paper specifically outlines the perception of university and workplace experts of the skills gap. We examine their views to obtain an in-depth, multifactorial, rich understanding of the soft-skills gap and the available ways to train soft skills and deal with common obstacles, such as skill transfer difficulties (Laker & Powell, 2011), namely, the inability of trainees to transfer and generalize skills from a training environment to the workplace. We were also interested in views that would apply in a Southern European country such as Greece as well as thoughts about the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Method
Design
We used a focus-group interview research design that enabled us to observe participant interactions while generating the data on the soft-skills gap. Participants position themselves by responding and building on each other’s views (Plummer-D’Amato, 2008). We conducted two virtual focus-group interviews through the Zoom platform, one in May 2021 and one in May 2022. We conducted the group interviews virtually for two reasons: (1) to avoid unnecessary pandemic-related risks and (2) to ensure that individuals with expert knowledge could participate even if they were in separate and distant cities. The data were collected for a transnational EU project (Level UP, https://level-up-project.eu/), in which similar focus-group interviews were conducted in three other countries (The Netherlands, Cyprus, Spain). This paper focuses on the Greek data.
We employed an interview guide containing three topics for the two focus-group interviews. The first guide concerned soft skills in general and included the following main topics: (a) importance and awareness of soft skills, (b) prioritization of soft skills, and (c) ways of evaluating a person’s soft skills. The second guide concerned training of soft skills and included the following main topics: (a) key formats for soft skills courses, (b) whether formats should be differentiated according to study area/year of study/skill category, and (c) assessment criteria for courses of skill development. The interview guides were validated by a transnational group of experts, who participated as members of the “Level Up” consortium and can be found at the Open Science Framework repository (https://osf.io/h8ncq/). We aimed to address these topics in a maximum of 2 hours but also aimed to maintain flexibility throughout the discussion.
Participants and Procedure
Participants were 13 experts (3 men, 10 women, aged 22–58 years old) on soft skills, with varied professional backgrounds (2 university professors, 1 student, 1 graduate, 1 entrepreneur with significant hiring expertise, 2 within-university trainers and counselors, 1 outside-of-university trainer, 5 career guidance counselors), chosen at the recommendation of two within-institution experts on soft skills. Seven experts were allocated to the first group interview and six to the second focus-group interview, so as to make the two groups comparable in terms of professional background, gender, and age. The study received the ethical approval of the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Crete (Protocol Number of Decision: 65/5 May 2021).
The moderator (the first author of the article) initially approached all participants by email and informed the prospective participants about the purpose of the study as well as about ethical issues, promising confidentiality and anonymity. He also requested that participants return a signed informed consent form via email prior to the day of the focus groups. The two sessions began with the moderator welcoming all participants and repeating the ground rules. He further reminded the participants that they had given their consent for the meeting to be recorded for transcription purposes and asked whether there were any objections. After an initial round of introductions, the moderator provided a short comment for each topic and asked the participants for their views. With the assistance of a comoderator, he tried to maintain flexibility in the conversation, asking participants to build on each other’s thoughts, and was also mindful of maintaining a time balance between all participants. One round of discussion was performed for each topic. The first focus-group interview lasted 2 hours, the second 1 hour and 45 minutes. Both focus-group interviews flowed smoothly and according to the protocols. The coverage of the topics in the protocol was monitored by the comoderator during the sessions; the participants provided positive feedback and expressed their satisfaction toward the end of the sessions.
Data Analysis
The data were initially in the form of an audio and video recording. After the transcription, we destroyed the recordings and protected the participants’ personal data through the use of pseudonyms. Following the verbatim transcription of the audio recordings, we anonymized the transcriptions. We applied inductive and reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) to the data corpus. The principal researcher (first author) openly analyzed the data according to the premises of reflexive thematic analysis. Initially, the principal investigator read the focus group transcripts multiple times during the process of data immersion and for initial code development. Then, he generated first-order themes, and finally he produced second-order themes by clustering the first-order themes. In line with reflexive thematic analysis, whereby the quality of results does not depend on the analysis from multiple researchers, a second senior researcher (the second author) was involved in reviewing the themes produced, with the sole aim of avoiding major misunderstandings/misrepresentation, omissions, or inconsistencies. There were no discrepancies in the understanding of the two researchers.
Results
The analysis of the transcripts revealed a concern about the soft-skills gap. Table 1 presents the themes and subthemes.
Types of Soft Skills
Participants talked about skills in two broad categories: communicative, social, or interpersonal skills; and individual or intrapersonal skills. They went into depth about what these skills involve and made arguments about their importance in different facets of work life. Specific skills are reported in Table 1.
Talking About the Gap
Participants directly talked about a gap, mostly in terms of young employee deficits:
“In all the years I have taught human resources selection processes – and in that context, we discuss the skills necessary for employees to live up to job demands – that is what I primarily try to do, because in the past years I have seen that there are students with serious deficits in issues of soft skills.”
“Very often, people come to us and ask for employment. They come to us overqualified in terms of standard qualifications, but they have serious issues with what is defined as soft skills. They come to us with their powerful degrees, but I would say that they are defeated from the start.”
Specific Gaps (in Specific Soft Skills Areas)
Participants also talked about specific soft-skills gaps, referring to digital skills, initiative, time management and creativity:
“If someone studies the mismatch between efficacy and importance, they quickly see that digital skills are an issue […] If you see how satisfied I am by the education, you see that they [digital skills] are low in importance, there is high incongruence. The same applies to initiative, entrepreneurship, and foreign languages”
“[…] They lack in initiative, time management, and creativity, which is the first thing I notice, and to an extent in communicative skills.”
“[…] What I see in students is that they find it very difficult to take the initiative.”
Dimensions of the Gap
Employee Deficits
One type of view concerning the soft-skills gap concentrated on the responsibility that the young employees have in identifying their own deficits or on the exhibition of low work perseverance:
“Really, what we have seen from job-search techniques on the part of the unemployed and people who would like to open a business, we have seen this: that they really don’t know much, they don’t have a view of what they need.”
“From the employers’ perspective, the businesses, they see young adults without realistic thinking, who do not have a sense of … it is, of course, another era of the marketplace that asks a lot and gives back little … That is an ease in which they leave their jobs.”
Job Demands
The Role of the Marketplace and Controversy
One concern the participants expressed involved the controversy of the university-marketplace relationship. This concern involved both a moral component (i.e., Should the market determine what the university does?) and a feasibility component (i.e., Can the university adapt to the demands of the market?):
“These are huge issues, I totally agree. The extent to which the market can dictate or determine what happens at the universities.”
“The university cannot be determined by the job market. In principle, I do not agree, but even if I did agree, it moves faster. If I decide to play the game of determination by the market, but the market transforms quicker! What it tells you today is no longer valid tomorrow. And it takes 5 years to adjust.”
Constant Changes
Another concern involved the constant change in the work environment, especially in Greece, which, by 2022, has been in continual economic and social turmoil for 13 years and recently endured the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic:
“In the previous decade, we had the economic crisis, and the economic crisis brought sudden changes to organizations. The same happened with the pandemic now, didn’t it? Thinking about the dynamic environment, where changes are not always programmed, I would say that flexibility and adaptability are critical skills”
“[…] Work environments are becoming more demanding. That is, employees are required to do more and more with less. This means either with less time, which we call work intensification, where you have to do more work with less time. Or working for less money, or working with fewer resources.”
Country Specifics
Greece also has another important characteristic for the use of soft skills, as pointed out by the participants: It is a country with many small-sized enterprises. The nature of these enterprises often requires that a young employee should expect irrational demands and have the set of soft skills to tackle them successfully:
“And precisely because we are a country with many small enterprises, which I do not know what skills they ask for, what I see from the women I counsel are people who are willing to comply with the demands of the business owners. That is – how should I say this? – with a lack of demands. Either concerning work shifts or money.”
“In a small business or organization with few people, they are asked to play more than one role. They may be required to do more than one thing, and because there is usually no clear job description, what is demanded of a young employee has to be read between the lines. This is part of the everyday struggle one faces when undertaking work.”
“[…] The job market doesn’t know what it wants, especially most businesses, with those very small enterprises and the employers who themselves do not have the skills they demand of their employees. This has to be understood by young employees, that is, they have to understand that their employer possibly does not have the skills he demands of them, soft skills or not.”
How to Narrow the Gap
Types of Skills
The participants discussed how young adults could respond more effectively to an ever-changing work environment. They concluded that metacognitive skills, or “learning how to learn,” was very important. They also stressed flexibility and adaptability, the skills that directly refer to adapting to a fluctuating environment as well as initiative and autonomy that would help a person effect change:
“Flexibility and adaptability are very important skills […] That doesn’t mean only finding solutions or seeing things from different angles and being creative, but having cognitive flexibility and the motivation for constant learning – that is the only way we can adjust to a constantly changing environment.”
“For me, what is most important to resolve is the skill of initiative and autonomy, that is, to operate autonomously and take the initiative to change some things to work more effectively. Consequently, autonomy and initiative to stand on my two feet and have the feeling I can effect change.”
“In our line of work, my opinion is that metacognitive skills are indeed very important, metacognitive skills. Also, if I may add, learning how to learn.”
“I think that, at a university level, I would not prioritize among skills. I think they are equally important, because – and this is my personal opinion – universities prepare citizens, not only professional skills. If I placed one priority at the university, that would be metacognitive skills, that is, students learning how to learn.”
“I’d like to say that someone comes for a certain field of knowledge and the fields themselves, believe me, evolve over time. That is, someone comes with a label, and that thing disappears, evolves. Therefore, the new key is the concept – how should I say this? – of flexibility. The new environment is adaptability.”
Real-Life Context
Especially when discussing the format of university learning, the participants argued against “in-vitro”, laboratory learning and stressed the importance of real-life “in-vivo” learning. This can only be achieved through close collaboration between universities and the marketplace:
“Therefore, I believe that we should, [….], what we define as the job market or the business world should become a space in permanent open interaction with our academic institutions. […] Let’s open the spaces, get away from institutionalization, because there is institutionalization, we are eaten away by the routine, and I think you are too. I mean, you are eaten away by routine at the universities – this thing has to open. And to constantly be kept open.”
“[…] The laboratory context, the laboratory conditions that we aim to create in order to teach, to transfer life conditions can be none other than the conditions of life itself. What I mean to say is when we are in a psychoeducation group and we talk about decision-making, critical thinking, conflict management, effective communication, we have to recreate the conditions of real life. Experiential learning is not representative of life. It has to be life itself.”
Discussion
It is not easy to provide a full account of the soft-skills gap, – even more so based on studying the views of soft skills experts solely in Greece, today. On the one hand, its very existence is disputed (Cappelli, 2015), and on the other hand, it involves a wealth of factors that are constantly interacting with each other and that are therefore impossible to map in their entirety. To highlight the views of a group of soft skills experts (of various expertise) on the key factors accounting for the gap, we conducted two focus groups (May 2021 and May 2022) in Greece. Participants acknowledged that they deal with the gap in their work and seemed concerned. While identifying gaps in specific skills, they mostly referred to a general soft-skills gap. They attributed part of it to individual factors (i.e., the gap as a function of the person), but mostly they were concerned with the continuous changes in the work and social environment and the difficult reality of the Greek economy encountered through constant crises for the past years (i.e., the gap as a function of the environment) (see Manninen & Hobrough, 2000). This difficulty is amplified by the fact that the Greek economy is largely reliant on small-sized enterprises that create a demanding environment for young graduates (also in Constable & Touloumakos, 2009), but also the many years of economic turmoil and the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic (for skills in the postpandemic work environment, see Bayerlein, et al., 2021). As expected, the experts’ views reflected the multidimensional nature of the soft-skills gap and, implicitly, the constant interaction between employers, employees, the work and social environment – echoed too in the work of Lewin (1946) and more recent authors (e.g., Reis & Holmes, 2012), as well as authors adopting a sociocultural view of learning and skill (indicatively, Billett, 2001; Brown et al., 1989; Engeström, 2001).
The analysis of the intricacies and difficulties of the work environment on behalf of the experts led rather effortlessly to the primary conclusion of the focus groups and, consequently, of our research: Universities and students should invest in building metacognitive skills; in other words, they should invest in “one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes or anything related to them” (Flavell, 1976, p. 232). This advice comes with a caveat: There is no advantage in investing in in-vitro learning in university classrooms and laboratories. Instead, universities should find innovative ways to embed learning within “real-life” social interaction (see also in Fleming & Haigh, 2018), working closely with local communities. This type of interaction goes beyond simply acknowledging the value of internships (Andrews & Higson, 2008) and sets the stage for a different model of higher education.
The findings of our study should be treated with caution. Our sample consisted of experts who could offer a comprehensive account of the soft-skills gap, while considering all relevant factors. Their views, however, do not necessarily thoroughly reflect the interplay of the factors that contribute to the skills gap, and neither were they selected in a way that allows for generalizations typically following quantitative studies and relevant sampling procedures. On the one hand, our sample of experts holds views potentially influenced by their cultural background, making our conclusions more readily applicable to educational and work contexts within a similar cultural environment; on the other hand, a full account of the soft-skills gap can only be given if employees and employers as well as environmental factors are studied first hand, ideally as they interact with each other. This would require complex research designs that are dyadic, use nested data, and are longitudinal in nature.
A significant challenge for future research is to study the nature of the soft-skills gap within a changing environment. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Resignation are leading to knowledge-intensive organizations (Serenko, 2022), rendering metacognitive skills even more valuable. In addition to using more complex research designs that can be applied to the study of the soft-skills gap, researchers need to examine how the gap can be narrowed by considering that employees need to adapt to a work environment that is gravitating toward knowledge-based processes. This seems more achievable if the employees can learn on the job. Perhaps this observation led our focus-group interviews to conclude that the prescription for narrowing the gap should focus on developing metacognitive abilities within a real-life context. Further research of the sort mentioned above is needed to corroborate our findings and provide more insight into how the soft-skills gap can be properly addressed.
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