Hi dcradd:

Your question goes from the specific to the general. Yes, your designers may be challenged going from the technical to the soft skills arena. Although I propose the basic design skills (analyze, design, develop, implement, evaluate) will work in any domain. I suspect the divergence in efficiency is probably coming from unfamiliarity with the instructional strategies that are effective in this domain.

IMHO most soft skill learning objectives will deal with leaning cognitive strategies; mostly skills or techniques that help solve problems or generate new ideas (creative problem solving). These objectives lend toward the discovery and guided discovery strategies which are usually to time consuming and inefficient in the technical area that deals mostly with fact and procedures.

Smith and Ragan do a pretty good job on addressing how to teach problem solving (Chapter 10) in their book Instructional Design (ISBN 0-675-21262-6).

I think your taking the right approach and looking for ways to add to their designer tool book.

Good luck!

Cj

good instructional design is good instructional design...

@LoveLearning: excellent point. By way of followup, here are some interesting points on ID http://www.thiagi.com/pfp/IE4H/february2006.html (see the section on Rapid Training Design)
@Cj: You say, "IMHO most soft skill learning objectives will deal with leaning cognitive strategies; mostly skills or techniques that help solve problems or generate new ideas (creative problem solving)." This is not limited to soft skills, of course. When I teach computer security or programming in Java, I teach cognative strategies and problem solving.

Echo "Good instructional design is good instructional design".

However, my experience has been that folks who do a lot of technical training are used to more defined paths (i.e. step-action-result tables and structures) whereas softskills tends to have many more branches.

The key difference in skill (which applies to any design, but I see the issue occur more with softskills training) is how to determine a reasonable set of "boundaries" to structure a learning path/experience without being too constrained or too loose while maintaining a level of realism and applicability.