Soft Skills In Practice And In Education: An Evaluation

Abstract

The paper measures the soft skills needs of companies and industry to technical oriented academic graduates, especially coming from IT course programs like business informatics, computer science, or information management. Therefore, between March and September 2010, two groups of researchers at the University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Technikum Vienna analyzed job profiles and the intended denotation of certain keywords. Primarily, one group worked on the statistical content analysis of job offers which could be found in Austrian newspapers or were provided by online job platforms. The other group developed a survey to be sent to several companies in Austria and was addressed to human resources departments. The paper explains the evaluation results in details and discusses its necessary implication on academic curriculum design.