Soft skills for hard times: Developing a framework of preparedness for overcoming crises events in higher education students

Since the beginning of the 21st century, organisations have been going through rapid changes. These affect not only companies but also socioeconomics, politics, information technology and managerial innovations: Developments in information systems are forcing companies to update their management systems and societal challenges (e.g. pandemias) are paradigm-shifting also in terms of how people work. Regardless, people consensually keep a critical role on the organizational knowledge management axis that is crucial for companies' competitive advantage (Monavvarian & Khamda, 2010). In the last decade, graduates' employability has been a matter of increasing concern and discussion amongst scholars. One of the most discussed topics is the quality of students and their lack of soft skills required to increase individual employability (Sin & Neave, 2016; Clarke, 2017). Higher Education Institutions (HEI) play a crucial role and have a social responsibility regarding the preparation of graduates with the skills and abilities required to be considered by the labour market (Sin & Neave, 2016), however, employers emphasize that graduates are not able to transfer the acquired skills to real-life situations (Shuayto, 2013) arguing that HEIs are still teaching academically oriented pedagogy instead of applied learning and functional skills (Sin & Neave, 2016). On top of this, the challenges the near future proposes are of an unknown and uncertain nature, and reports suggest they may derive from potentially cataclysmic events such as extreme climate events, terrorism and pandemics. These are situations that are completely novel and may require a set of skills that is yet to be developed and integrated in a working framework. In this paper we propose a conceptualization of the new soft skill set that HEIs should be implementing to enable students not only a higher employment rate but also the ability to deal and cope with unexpected and dramatic events with unforeseen consequences.