How to teach soft skills with eLearning

eLearning is known for delivering effective specialist training to employees. After all, interactive online courses are the best way of preparing and delivering specialist materials. But hard skills aren’t the be-all and end-all in the workplace: According to the latest eLearning BENCHMARKING study, 96% of companies today consider soft skills to be just as important as hard skills. Communication and leadership skills are in particular demand. The good news is that eLearning is also good for teaching soft skills, saving you time and money! More than half of companies already teach their employees soft skills through a combination of face-to-face learning and eLearning (blended learning).

This article explains why soft skills are so important for the success of your business, the 10 soft skills your employees need to master in order to work together in a professional manner, and what tools you need to deliver soft skills training sessions through eLearning.

Hard and soft skills are, so to speak, the yin and yang of day-to-day working life. While hard skills simply denotes all the specialist skills that employees accumulate in the course of their career, soft skills are particular traits and skills that are not part of specialist knowledge.

Hard skills can be proven through diplomas, certificates, language skills or technical expertise, for example. The words themselves indicate the meaning of the phrase: Hard skills are concrete and tangible. Examples: School diplomas, academic degrees, language skills, training completed or software knowledge, for instance. 

Soft skills, on the other hand, refers to personal qualities, character traits, behaviors and attitudes, which go far beyond learned specialist knowledge. Because they are almost impossible to measure, they are known as “soft” skills. They can be divided into three categories, however: Methodological, social, and personal skills.

Like yin and yang, hard and soft skills are by no means mutually exclusive, but complement one another, and even where they are unevenly distributed, with good training they can combine to form highly competent employees.

Both technology and the workplace are changing at an increasingly furious pace. Stephane Kasriel, CEO of Upwork and World Economic Forum Council member, currently estimates the half-life of acquired skills at five years. This means that a specialist skill someone acquires will only be worth half as much in five years’ time as it is today. This figure varies from sector to sector of course, but is essentially realistic: Employees today must be able to adapt quickly and acquire new knowledge every day to keep up with developments. This makes soft skills all the more important. Unlike hard skills, they are permanent, long-lasting, and universally applicable to everyday work. If you have employees who are adaptable, have initiative, use their time effectively, and are able to take a creative approach to new tasks, you and they will be able to look to the future with confidence.

The list of soft skills is long. However, there are some core skills that will help your employees succeed regardless of their position in your company. Below is a list of the most sought-after soft skills:

Although soft skills are closely linked to our character and are often acquired between early childhood and adolescence, they can still be taught and developed in adulthood. Similarly to specialist skills training, courses can be taken on topics such as time management, presentation skills, or how to handle conversations with customers. As long as you have the right tools and take a multimedia-based, interactive approach, these topics can be easily delivered via eLearning. Below are three different types of delivery.

In many cases, soft skills are just as easy to learn as hard skills, but require more frequent interaction. Since professional eLearning tools incorporate a wide range of media and interactive features, online courses can be an excellent way of teaching soft skills. eTraining courses are particularly effective at raising awareness of the importance of specific soft skills and thus motivating learners to deploy them in their day-to-day work. They can be used to teach the fundamentals of taking a creative approach, visual thinking, time management, presentation techniques, and similar topics, for example. They are also good for practicing how to handle customer criticism appropriately or prevent social engineering. Regular repetition of courses (annually, for example) will reinforce soft skills in your employees’ minds and ensure they are easily able to access them in their everyday work. Features such as single- or multiple-answer questions, matching exercises, picture selection, gapfills, open questions and dialog questions allow learners to play an active role and learn new behaviors through interactions.

Employees from sales, distribution, customer service, and accounting often find themselves facing difficult and challenging situations. Here, it’s important to be fully prepared and to respond in such a way that those concerned and the customer are given the best possible service and are satisfied at the end of the conversation. This is where Knowledgeworker Coach comes in:

Knowledgeworker Coach is an interactive behavioral trainer that prepares your employees to handle specific situations and conversations in a business environment. They receive communications training to help them handle sales, requests for advice and emergencies, for example, and you can provide them with information and develop their empathy to enable them to react appropriately to customer complaints. Knowledgeworker Coach ensures you provide your employees with the highest quality of support—even in difficult situations. It allows you to portray specific conversations and situations, and changes them dynamically depending on the answer selected by learners. Learners see the facial expressions of the other person or changing scenarios, for example, that allow them to understand how the answer they have chosen alters the course of the conversation. Direct feedback gives the exercises a realistic feel and ensures that training has a long-lasting effect. Videos can also be easily integrated into coaching and create an authentic—and thus more effective—learning environment. At the end of the exercise, learners are given detailed feedback, explaining which reactions influenced the conversation and how. In this way, your employees learn directly from their experience and from any mistakes (keywords: worked-example effect).

The interactive coach not only helps your employees optimize their communication skills, it also heightens their awareness of the situation in question and improves their analysis and reactions.

Blended learning is currently the form of training used by the greatest number of companies to teach their employees soft skills. It combines the benefits of analog face-to-face sessions with the flexibility of digital learning. This allows the benefits of each form of learning to be taken advantage of, while compensating for their disadvantages. In the case of soft skills training, for example, the underlying theory can be taught in an online course with learners trying it out in practice later at a practical, face-to-face session. This not only makes learning more effective for everyone involved, but also offers more flexibility in terms of where and when people learn. Learning to take a creative approach, effective time management and communications are natural choices for this form of training. 

The best way of organizing blended learning is to use a learning management system (LMS). This is a learning platform that centralizes training. It enables you to organize learning activities (both online and offline), design online courses and roll them out in segments, measure learning outcomes, and network participants and lecturers with one another. In addition, it makes all learning material available, enables learners to exchange ideas and allows binding deadlines to be agreed.