There is a grossly mistaken notion that low employabilty among students is due to lack of soft skills in them. I agree this is one of the elements contributing to low employability. This pumped up and orchestrated perception is a product of the growth of the IT industry where interacting with foreign clients by people working on Time and Material (T&M) contract IT projects exposed the shortcomings of our graduates on this count. One has to understand that aligning with western pronounciation, way of dressing, understanding and falling in line with their social norms, knowing their slangs, laughing with them, sensitvity to their sense of humour, table manners, and so on are just some of the elements that contributed to the perception of poor social skills and low emloyability.
More fundamental are intrinsic to our (including fresh professionals) competency, attitudes, values and practices. These include our youngsters' superficial subject knowledge in whichever field, lack of depth, inabiity to apply theory to practices, delivering outputs to meet fitness for purpose, holistic approach to a problem aimed at practical problem solving, lack of interest and initiative to achieve goals, honesty in communication, empathy to others, display of confidence in interactions, professional integrity, reliability, punchuality, Chalte hai approach, willingnness to go the extra mile to meet commitments, mixing up professional and persinal issues, not respecting others' and one's own time, low self esteem and so on.
While some of these behavioural traits are integral to our society's culture, there has been a degradation in value systems over time driven by access to easy money from IT growth, without realising its short term nature. Added to this is the commercialisation of our higher education system where focus is on fast rolling out graduates to meet market demand least caring for quality, unscrupulous promoters of educational institutions, low integrity of regulatory system, low quality teachers also of low integrity, and in essence living in a misplaced sense of euphoria.
everyone is happy so why change syndrome! So my submission is employability is much more than an issue of soft skills. However unemployability has become synonimous with poor soft skills for variety of reasons including myopia and self serving interests of soft skill trainers.