Investigating the role of soft skills in the workplace through individual internship experiences of FPT University students

Abstract

Soft skills have been regarded as essential in life, including in the workplace. They are essential for career success, in particular, and they are some of the most important traits that employers look for when hiring employees. At FPT University, a four-month corporate internship program is a key component in the curriculum. It gives students the chance to apply what they have learned in school to the real workplace in terms of domain knowledge. Besides that, they also need to apply their soft skills in order to succeed at completing assigned tasks. It is believed that through task-related activities, for example, communication, interaction, presentation, or group work, their soft skills will gradually develop. Despite its important role in students’ on-the-job training and future career, little research on this topic has been done at the tertiary level in Vietnamese context. Our research was carried out to address this gap. Our thesis seeks to understand how FPT students develop their soft skills while participating in internships. To this end, mixed methods, surveys and interviews, were used. The surveys were conducted online, with 92 FPT students taking part in. The interviews were carried out with 9 FPT students and 4 supervisors who oversaw the student participants’ internship. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses showed that a majority of students understood that soft skills were not only useful during their internship, but would also give them advantages in their future employability, such as setting them apart compared to other candidates when they apply for a job in the future. Supervisors’ opinions showed mixed evaluations, with supervisors saying that although students were inexperienced in self-assessing the problems they face, they possessed the ability to learn quickly and therefore help them gradually improve the above drawback. The interns suggested that difficulties need to be carefully analyzed in order to perceive them from multi-perspectives and produce potential solutions to the problem. In addition, supervisors advised students to improve their soft skills at school for enhancing themselves’ worth and actively engage with their supervisors to learn and to actively interact, ask questions, and seek assistance from others around them. Overall, this study is expected to offer some industry-based insight to both FPT students and the University with the hope that adjustments will be made to better prepare students for their on-the-job training and future career.