Are You Soft on Soft Skills? The Next Step in Soft Skill Development for Graduate Students
Baylee Rubinoff & Lauren Hotchkiss, University of Guelph
Graduate students entering both science and practice career fields find themselves at a disadvantage, compared to other applicants, by not developing their soft skills. In general, soft skills include “personal and interpersonal qualities and characteristics” and they can also encompass digital literacy, networking, professional behaviour, communication and more (Rudolph, 2017). A 2019 report from the University of Guelph found that, while over 80% of graduate students reported that soft skills would be necessary for their job, less than 50% of students reported that these skills were being developed in the curriculum. This shows a significant gap between the students’ perception of the importance of soft skills and the training they are receiving. Some students may seek out soft skill training on their own, through co-curricular activities. However, the 2019 report uncovered some of the significant barriers to engaging in co-curricular skill development such as time constraints, scheduling conflicts, lack of supervisor support, and most importantly, not being aware that these opportunities existed. To address the lack of awareness of co-curricular skill development in graduate students, we are hoping to develop a workshop that (1) provides students with strategies for finding online skill development resources and (2) teaches them to leverage these skills to be successful in science and practice careers. This presentation will provide a summary of the research findings related to soft skill development and awareness, as well as, promote and gain feedback for a workshop that will be developed for attendees of the Canadian Psychology Association Conference in 2020.
Do managers behave more fairly when their employees feel uncertain?
Midori Nishioka, University of Waterloo
Managers must often communicate work decisions that create feelings of uncertainty in their employees. Not surprisingly, employees react negatively to such decisions. One way that managers can prevent negative reactions is to communicate decisions fairly, for example, by providing timely, reasonable, and detailed explanations. Whereas the literature shows that employees desire more fairness when they feel uncertain, research has not examined whether managers correspondingly behave more fairly when employees most need them to be fair. To address this gap, we conducted a multi-wave within-person study with managers who had communicated work decisions to several of their subordinates in the past month. The results largely supported our predictions, suggesting that managers are sensitive to employee uncertainty and correspondingly behave more fairly toward employees who feel more uncertain as a result of a decision. However, results also suggested that some managers are only responsive to the felt uncertainty of high-performing employees.
