When it comes to e-learning, what is meant by soft skills?

Thanks
Lisa

I'll defer to the pro's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_skills

But, IMO, hard skills are quite structured/regimented: like how to save an Office document to a certain folder on your computer- there is a finite path with right/wrong steps.

Soft skills tend to be more transaction oriented (interacting with others, coversational), and don't have a firm structure with clear right/wrong approach.

quote:

Originally posted by LRochelle:
When it comes to e-learning, what is meant by soft skills?

Thanks
Lisa

Soft skills are soft skills - regardless of the delivery method. E-learning has nothing to do with it.

E-learning is simply a delivery mode, so lets set that aside.

For some reason, the industry and our clients tend to categorize skills into soft and everything else (I never hear anyone use "hard" as the opposite; sometimes I've heard "technical"). Usually when people say "soft" skills they're referring to things that do not necessarily have only one specific step-by-step way to accomplish a goal, and/or require critical thinking and problem solving skills. Sales, active listening, training, customer service, etc... are a few examples. Tying a shoe, entering a record into a database, and so on would be in the other category. The problem is, most jobs and most skills really involve a mix.

LoveLearning has described this well, so I just add a few more points. Soft skills primarily involves human interactions. When it comes to e-learning, this can be a bit more limiting as there is only so many way we can use the e-learning system to practice our soft skills. However, this will change a lot as technology is improved. I can easily imagine virtual training rooms in the future where people would interact with each other just as naturally as we do in the real world with body language and all the rest of it. Today, it's probably less common to use e-learning to learn soft skills though. Lets see how this develops in the future.