Assessing Emotional Intelligence: A Competency Framework for the Development of Standards for Soft Skills
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Assessing Emotional Intelligence: A Competency Framework for the ...

Chapter 1:  Introduction
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The following year, Jacques Delors and Alexandra Draxler of the UNESCO Task Force on Education for the Twenty-First Century wrote,

That means we need to learn more about how contemporary education influences that acquisition of life skills, how their acquisition is related to various types and levels of education, and of course what might be done to make personal and interpersonal skills more explicitly central to learning outcomes of compulsory and post-compulsory education. (2002, p. 32)

Despite their acknowledged importance, it is often also reported that soft skills tend to be neglected and under developed. For example, Connell (1998) noted that while they are reported as being essential requirements for the workplace, they are frequently reported as lacking. The question of why this is so, therefore, needs to be asked.

Connell (1998) indicated at least part of the answer to this question. She spoke of them as being “hard to understand”. Citing Field and Ford (1995), who described them as being “under the surface” like an iceberg, she wrote, “This makes them liable to subjectivity, difficult to define, observe, or measure, and open to the influence of work organisation and the social construction of skill in the workplace” (p. 70).

In a similar vein Curtis and McKenzie (2001) also commented on the difficulty of conceptualising and implementing such skills. They noted that this has prevented them from being included in training frameworks such as the one prescribed by the Mayer Committee (1992). Discussing this framework they wrote,

Mayer did not include such skills at all, on the grounds that they are difficult to teach and assess. Yet, it is this set of skills that employers most commonly say that they wish to develop in their work-force. Although the challenges in conceptualising and implementing soft skills are formidable, the effort would seem to be warranted. (p. 41)

They also wrote,

While the Mayer Committee was cautious in this area because of perceived difficulties in learning and assessing values and attitudes, there is growing evidence that these entities can be assessed and therefore can legitimately be included within the framework. (p. 51)