The importance of soft skills in higher education: the case of the National Technological Institute of Mexico

Abstract

The development of soft skills gains relevance due to the demand for professionals capable of adapting to different work environments, which leads Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to implement them in their study programs. Their teaching, given the global context of the current labor market, takes on even equal or greater relevance than technical skills, due to the competitive advantages it provides to graduates. The purpose of this research is to analyze the guidelines, graduate profiles, and subject programs of the National Technological Institute of Mexico (TecNM), to show how the teaching of soft skills is being addressed in this higher education institution.

The methodology used is descriptive-documental with which it is sought to present the current panorama of the teaching of soft skills in the TecNM undergraduate programs, through the review of guidelines, graduate profiles and subject programs, with a transversal approach, which allows addressing a significant percentage of the total of said programs.

The results obtained show that although the educational model considers the importance of soft skills in the training of its professionals, but that their teaching varies significantly from one program to another, and they do not have the same presence in the curricular content.

As a conclusion, it is considered that despite the great benefits of teaching and developing soft skills in higher education, by providing graduates with competencies that allow them to be more competitive professionally and have better job opportunities; in many cases soft skills are relegated to a secondary level of importance, giving much greater relevance to hard skills, in opposition to what is manifested in the educational model and the graduate profiles of TecNM undergraduate programs.