Development of Soft Skill Enhancement Plan for Chinese Students of Knowledge and Innovation Management Program

Abstract

With the expansion of college enrollment year by year in China, the number of college graduates has increased sharply, which causes the employment problem among graduates to become more and more challenging. Therefore, society and employers put forward higher requirements for the graduates, not only in academic talent, but also in other compound abilities. Appropriate soft skills play an important role in successful careers as well as social interactions. More and more organizations recognize how soft skills in the workplace differentiate great employees from good ones, so these skills are highly valued by employers looking for new graduates. In order to make Chinese graduates become more competitive in the job market, the aim of the research is to enhance Chinese students’ soft skills. Therefore, the objective of this research are: 1) to investigate the soft skill problems of Chinese graduates of Knowledge and Innovation Management Program at the early stage of their career; 2) to identify most important soft skill based on the c ommon soft skills that occupationally required in the Chinese job market and academically fostered for graduates in Thailand; 3) to design a soft skill enhancement plan to improve Chinese students’ soft skills. In this paper, the Chinese top 20 well-paid occupations are chosen as a research sample. Double diamond designing process model, as a tool to solve problems and improve service, provides a systematic process for the researcher to achieve these objectives. Following the four stages including discover, define, developand deliver of the process, an interview is carried out to know the soft skills problems and soft skill enhancement requirement among Chinese students, content analysis based on O*Net Content Model and Thailand Qualification Framework (TQF ) for Higher Education is used to analyze the common soft skills. After that, the five -star scale questionnaire and interview are applied to define the most important soft skill. In-depth is used to obtain the factors affecting graduates’ problem solving a bility. And brainstorming is to help the researcher get suggestions of how to enhance these factors. The findings show that the plan is useful to cultivate Chinese talent personnel to meet the needs of the Chinese job market from the perspective of Chinese students’ feedback and comparison between the factors and requirement of Chinese companies.