Soft skills are essentially people skills – the non-technical, intangible, personality-specific skills that determine one’s strengths as a leader, speaker, listener, negotiator, and conflict mediator. It means skills related to human attitude, team work, leadership qualities, over all human nature enhancements. Soft skills thus is a sociological term relating to a person’s “EQ” (Emotional Intelligence Quotient), the cluster of personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness, and optimism that characterize relationships with other people. They are, in many instances, complementary, and serve to unlock the potential for highly effective performance in people qualified with the requisite hard skills. In broader terms soft skills is a range of abilities including work ethics, courtesy, teamwork, self-discipline and self-confidence, professional presence, Continue reading
Modern HRM
John Holland’s Theory of Career Choice
It is John Holland’s view that career choice and career adjustment represent an extension of a person’s personality. People express themselves, their interests and values, through their work choices and experience. In his theory, Holland assumes that people’s impressions and generalizations about work, which he refers to as stereotypes, are generally accurate. By studying and refining these stereotypes, Holland assigns both people and work environments to specific categories. John Holland (1966, 1973, 1992, 1997) has published five books that explain his typological theory. Each book represents an update and a further-refined version of earlier work in the development of his theory. The -August 1999 issue of the book – The Journal of Vocational Behavior – contains 12 articles which describe Continue reading
Kirkpatrick’s Training Evaluation Model
Donald L Kirkpatrick, Professor Emeritus, University Of Wisconsin, first published his ideas in 1959, in a series of articles in the Journal of American Society of Training Directors. The articles were subsequently included in Kirkpatrick’s book Evaluating Training Programs. He was president of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) in 1975. Donald Kirkpatrick’s 1994 book, Evaluating Training Programs, defined his originally published ideas of 1959, thereby further increasing awareness of them, so that his theory has now become arguably the most widely used and popular model for the evaluation of training and learning. Kirkpatrick’s training evaluation model is now considered an industry standard across the HR and training communities. Four Levels of Kirkpatrick’s Training Evaluation Model The basic Continue reading
E-Learning at the Workplace
Globally, the e-learning market has been growing rapidly, and e-learning is beginning to emerge as the new model of training and education across a wide range of different sectors and industries. This growth has resulted in part from extensive changes in the working environment, and from a shift from a product-based economy to a knowledge-based one, meaning that there is a more pressing need to train and educate workforces in new technologies and services. In addition, technological advancement and challenges in technology-oriented working life have paved the way for new forms of electronic learning. Consequently, e-learning now accounts for a significant proportion of corporate investment in workforce training. E-learning is a learning experience that is delivered by electronic technologies including Continue reading
Stress – Causes, Challenges and Prevention Measures
Stress is a natural reaction generated within the body of a person to tackle a particular situation or event with focus, toughness and strength. The stress allows people to find out the unknown and hidden areas within them to face a situation. The stress mainly happens in two steps. One is the external stimulus referred to as the stressor that arises in an environment and the second is the response generated by the body to tackle that particular external stimulus. Stress could be basically categorised into different types. Eustress is the term that was coined to explain positive gains due to stress whereas distress is the stress that causes painfulness and negative fall backs. Hyper stress is the overreaction of Continue reading
Effectuation – New Paradigm of Entrepreneurship
The business world is permeated through and through this kind of rationality, based on what we see is happening today in the world, what are the trends? what will be the consequences? are forecasted the solutions in a business environment. However, according to Saras Sarasvathy, it is not how entrepreneurs think. The thought process is not “causal” but “effectual”. When a project is approached, the entrepreneur has three means skills: his own innate abilities, skills acquired through education and personal contacts. The entrepreneur is guided by a simple maxim: “To what extent can we control the future, we do not need to predict it.” Here lies all the difference. According to Sarasvathy, the successful entrepreneur does not try to predict Continue reading