Teaching Soft Skills in Healthcare and Higher Education: A Scoping Review Protocol

Teaching Soft Skills in Healthcare and Higher Education: A Scoping Review Protocol Svetlana Daly1*, Clare McCann1, Katrina Phillips1 1 The University of Auckland, New Zealand ABSTRACT Background: Soft skills and the need for their development have been discussed across industries for many years, predominantly in engineering, hospitality, and IT sectors. The importance of soft skills to career success has been well-documented, but gaps exist on how to teach them. Inter-industry variability and a lack of consensus in identifying and defining important soft skills adds to the problem. New research in teaching soft skills needs to be formally incorporated into training curricula, especially within healthcare and education sectors. This scoping review will answer these research questions: How are soft skills conceptualised, taught and assessed for healthcare and education professionals? Methods/Design: A search of health, education, and social science databases will be conducted including peer-reviewed and grey literature. Data will be extracted using a combination of the PRISMA ScR and PAGER framework. Analysis will be carried out utilising the PAGER framework and will yield descriptive summaries. Discussion: The review will collate literature on teaching and assessing soft skills in healthcare and higher education. It will map evidence in relation to current practices and research, gaps, evidence for practice, and research recommendations. The findings will be discussed in the full Scoping Review along with implications for teaching. Keywords: soft skills, teaching, assessment, healthcare, education 1. Background Soft skills have been a hot topic of discussion for the last three decades. The demand for soft skills in the workforce is more evident than ever, as countries move away from industrial economies into service-based economies. This move has also been referred to as fourth industrial revolution or 4IR (Chaka, 2020; Dean & East, 2019). Historically, it has been industry-specific technical skills that were important for employment and career progression (Robles, 2012). Recently, authors have suggested that while technical skills will help you gain employment, it is soft skills that will determine if you keep that employment (Tulgan, 2015). With soft skills having been described as “essential to survive and succeed in personal, professional and social life” (Rao, 2018; 216). Research supports this more recent position. As much as 75% of long-term career success can be attributed to soft skills and only 25% to technical skills (Chaka, 2020; Rao, 2018; Robles, 2012; Wats & Wats, 2009). It should be noted that the importance of soft skills may be industry-specific, with some sectors (e.g., manufacturing) placing greater emphasis on the tangible and measurable techniques and skills required for that industry to thrive (Rao 2018). * Correspondence to Svetlana Daly. Email: Social Science Protocols, February 2022, 1-8. http://dx.doi.org/10.7565/ssp.v5.6201 1 Soft skills are non-technical, transferable skills, whereas technical skills or industry knowledge are referred to as hard skills. Although there is general agreement that soft skills are non-technical and transferable, there is no clear consensus on their definition (Rao, 2018; Touloumakos, 2020). This lack of consensus is likely because soft skills encompass a variety of individual skills, attributes and values. Soft skills have been referred to using a range of different terminology, including: people skills, interpersonal skills, social skills, employability skills, transferable skills, life skills, emotional intelligence, essential skills, behavioural skills, non-cognitive skills, and 21st century skills. Despite the wide variability in the terms used to describe soft skills, there are commonly held perceptions of the more important ones. Robles (2012) identified the top ten as communication, courtesy, flexibility, integrity, interpersonal skills, positive attitude, professionalism, responsibility, teamwork, and work ethic. A more recent review suggested an expansion of soft skills into nine much broader categories. These included: qualities; volitions; problem solving; leadership skills; interpersonal skills; communication skills; emotional labour; aesthetics; and others (Touloumakos, 2020). In addition to the variability in definitions, historically, soft skills were seen as personality traits or abilities that are innate (we either have them or we do not), despite the term ‘skill’ implying that it can be taught (Rao, 2012; Touloumakos, 2020). Corporate business as well as science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) industries have been leading the research into soft skills over the last two decades. As early as early 90s, research focused on assessment and evaluation of soft skills, in particular for management personnel (Earl, 1993; Hughes, 1992; McKay, 1990; Terry, 1990). Research into teaching soft skills to engineers started to emerge at the turn of the last century (McLaughlan et al., 2001; Pulko & Parikh, 2003) Research into soft skills in health and higher education, in particular the education of health practitioners, is not as prevalent in the published literature. This gap could be influenced by the return on investments in business and the rapid growth in the engineering and technology sectors, which have been driven by profits and innovation. The health and education sectors however, are predominantly service-based, thus not profit-driven. Health and education also attract workers with different values to those in the above mentioned industries. Tertiary education providers in engineering and information technology (IT) have been making attempts to teach necessary soft skills as part of their professional training programmes (Bastos et al., 2019; Catelly, 2020; Matturro et al., 2019). This is in contrast with the health sector which yields more research from ‘on the job training’ which has highlighted the need for soft skills in managerial roles (Abraham et al., 2021; Tsey et al., 2018) and the provision of compassionate care (Andzik & Kranak, 2020; Lown, 2016; Taylor et al., 2019). The proposed scoping review aims to examine existing research into how soft skills are conceptualised and taught within healthcare and higher education. Scoping reviews are relatively new in social science research (having been widely used in health research for some time) and are ideally suited to mapping the available evidence in a specific research area (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005; Tricco et al., 2016). A scoping review is particularly useful in a research field which is complex or heterogeneous in nature and may not befit a more traditional systematic review (which usually seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular intervention or approach). A scoping review aims to explore the depth and breadth of a field of study, ‘scope’ or map the main concepts within that field of study and elucidate relevant (...truncated)