QUESTION: Can soft skills be taught with Web-based training, or should soft skills training take place in an instructor-led, classroom environment?

Edward Prentice III

The simple answer is yes, you can effectively teach some soft skills online, and no, there are some that are still best handled with face-to-face interaction. Many soft skills are primarily procedural or conceptual, which makes them good candidates for e-learning, even in its simplest form. Skill areas like management, marketing, strategy, administration, and so forth can be taught effectively with structured online programs. For example, I have seen substantially better results from online learners of project management skills than from their peers in the classroom.

Where the classroom still has the edge, however, is in the development of interpersonal skills, where the gap between conceptual understanding and actual performance is significant. In any discipline where coached interpersonal practice is important, classroom role-playing is the way to go.

The complex answer is that among the different components of soft skills courses, some lend themselves to e-learning more than others. Courses may cycle through such steps as presenting concepts, offering examples, testing understanding, applying concepts, practicing concepts, and providing performance feedback. Much of the conceptual knowledge or theory can be handled online more effectively than in a classroom. The same is true for the testing of that knowledge. The intellectual components of applying soft skills (analyzing, strategy setting, planning, evaluating) can be handled by e-learning equally well.

Practicing those soft skills in a role-play or mentored environment may be challenging when attempted online. But if learners do all of the preparatory work online, they will have more time and more focus for the face-to-face classroom work. Learners will be better prepared, as will the instructor if he or she has monitored the online work. This combination of online learning and classroom learning has acquired the unfortunate label of blended learning, as if it is a new technology or a pedagogical breakthrough. It's really just common sense use of available media.

Online media can and should be used for what they do best: connecting people to share experiences and benefit from collective knowledge. If you don't leverage the power of the Web to create decentralized perpetual learning communities, you might as well be shipping out CD-ROMs, condemning people to the once-ubiquitous loneliness of the long-distance learner.

By networking the minds of learners, you can contribute substantially to their understanding of softskills. Properly used, you may even be able to replace historical case studies with current true tales, and classroom coaching with ongoing peer support. This conjunction of online "knowledge-harvesting" and e-learning is an exciting field that I believe will produce some real breakthroughs in soft skills education in the next couple of years.

It's worth remembering that many people now operate in a largely virtual world, and while the soft skill principles of 10 years ago still hold true, their practical application today may be very different. We live in a world where remote communication is instinctive if not the norm. We use voicemail, email, and the Web daily. Many of us use remote communication much more than face-to-face conversation. (I do--it gives me the freedom to manage my time, and keeps communication focused and efficient. For warm and fuzzy bonding, we go to lunch.) The new communications paradigms have spawned their own protocols and soft skills. And the online media are becoming more appropriate than the classroom for teaching those skills.

Instead of taking an incremental approach to evolving soft skills training processes ("What are we doing now and how can we change it with technology?"), it might be better to ask "What are the learning objectives, what is the learners' environment, what are the resource constraints, and what is an ideal way to help learners get what they need?" The answers to these questions--not our current processes nor the available technology--should define our facilitating media models.

Published: September 2001