Soft skills in university and work contexts a documentary review

Abstract

Soft skills have been gaining great relevance in the academic and work environment because they are related to greater possibilities of employability and professional success. This article is a panoramic documentary review of these skills in different contexts, the objective of which is to identify the main investigations and their approaches in the educational field, mainly in the university context, and in the workplace. For this, thirty studies on the subject were reviewed and analyzed, from which some trends were found, such as, for example, that most of them were written in English; that in 2009 and 2012 was where more documents were published on the subject; that the most used methodology was the quantitative one; that there are various names for this type of skills, among other trends. Faced with the possible limitations, it was found that the approach in Latin America on these skills has been scarce, as well as the publications in Spanish; however, in the last decade there has been a strong interest in the subject, which is why it is expected that the number of investigations and publications in this regard will increase. It is concluded that it is necessary to strengthen instruction in soft skills in the university context since these complement hard skills, which allows a comprehensive training of students and greater
chances of employability since they are also a necessity in work contexts.