Enhancing tourism graduates’ soft skills: the importance of teaching reflective practice

Developing the Emotional Intelligence of Millennial Students: A Teaching Strategy

“…Because higher education has traditionally concentrated on training and developing hard skills, several authors have recommended the inclusion of soft skills training courses for the development of emotional intelligence within the framework of universities [37]. In this context, more and more specialists have highlighted a phenomenon encountered in education, namely, the transition from hard skills to soft skills [33,38,39]. The specialized literature even mentions the responsibility of higher education teachers to train exactly those soft skills related to emotional intelligence, which millennial students need the most in the workplace, using the most appropriate pedagogical strategies and techniques [13,19].…”

“…Some authors have even considered the issue of emotional "literacy", due to their lack of soft skills, millennial students need appropriate training of some basic skills regarding the management of emotions, mainly connected to knowing one's emotions, the awareness of one's own emotions, as well as the others' emotions [34,44]. In this sense, certain pedagogical techniques can be used, including self-assessment, keeping a diary, writing a reflective essay, creative writing, experiential techniques followed by debriefing [31,38,41,[44][45][46]. Recently, researchers have discovered that the use of creative and reflective writing techniques in higher education, irrespective of the field of study, helps students develop soft skills such as empathy, critical thinking, self-awareness, expressing emotions and insight, which can be applied in any field, and play a very important role in the present generational context [47][48][49][50][51][52][53].…”