Developing soft skills in graduate students

Abstract

Soft skills represent abilities that determine how students learn, think, and act. The objective of this contribution was to qualitatively investigate how graduate students perceive the development of these skills. Based on an empirical-analytical method with a phenomenological approach, a non-experimental, cross-sectional, and exploratory study was designed. Through semi-structured interviews with master's and doctoral students, we identified how they perceive the development of skills to communicate, argue points of view, exchange ideas, and critical and reflective judgment. The findings revealed that academic training influences the development of soft skills. From this perspective, it was concluded that it is advisable to strengthen these skills in students during their graduate studies because they will be useful when entering the workforce.