2 Strategies for Training Soft Skills Online

Soft skills are challenging to teach, but video modeling and role-playing are two effective strategies for training soft skills.

Training Magazine

Soft skills—those somewhat challenging to quantify but obvious-when-someone- doesn’t-have-them skills critical to professional success, including the ability to persuade others, communicate effectively, lead, and persevere—are challenging enough to train in face-to-face environments. But soft skills can be even more challenging to train in online environments, which are often characterized by asynchronous communication and objective assessments.

But challenging doesn’t mean impossible. Video modeling and role-playing are two effective strategies for soft training skills that may be a good fit for your audience.

Strategy #1: Use video modeling for presentation.

By definition, soft skills are qualitative and complex. Leadership, for example, comprises a complex bundle of skills, abilities, attitudes, and character traits, including everything from decisiveness and a willingness to take risks to the ability to get cooperation from diverse stakeholders—each element of which is challenging to quantify fully and describe. Fortunately, video modeling excels at communicating behavioral complexity economically. Whether you create your soft skills videos or purchase them from one of the many vendors available, to maximize effectiveness, you’ll want to implement t videos that conform to as many of the following four best practices as possible.

  1. Explain what you’re showing. Video modeling means using human actors to model both good and bad examples of behavior in a realistic situation while simultaneously pointing out, via callouts, what makes each example good or bad. The video should be accompanied by narration that points out exactly what’s going on and discusses the implications to be most effective. This narration can take the form of voiceover, text callouts, or even stopping the video at crucial junctures to intersperse video explanation.
  2. Make body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice count. Watching a video showing three separate vignettes of an effective team leader in action, for example—accompanied by narration that points out what each team leader is doing that’s effective (or ineffective) and how others are reacting to it—communicates far more in terms of subtlety and implications in a few minutes of learners’ time than text alone ever could.
  3. Communicate why (in addition to what.) Video modeling is also an effective strategy for driving emotional learning. When audiences see a human actor struggling (or succeeding), they tend to care—and that caring tends to help them both to identify with what they’re seeing and remember it.
  4. Turn passive into active. You can use video modeling both for straight content delivery and also to check to understand: simply pause the video at a handful of decision points and ask learners to answer a quick question by identifying the concept they’re seeing at work and predicting what will happen next in the video as a result.

Strategy #2: Use role-playing for practice and assessments.

Because soft skills are so complex and involve human attitudes, characteristics, and behaviors, which are nearly infinitely variable, standard approaches to assessments such as true/false and fill-in-the-blank options aren’t particularly useful. A learner might be able to identify several traits of an effective listener on a multiple-choice quiz or even an essay, for example, and still not be able to listen effectively.

For this reason, role-playing is invaluable, both for ungraded practice and assessments. While role-playing can be tricky to pull off in an online environment, there are several approaches, one of which is likely appropriate for your next soft-skills training:

  • Role-playing in person. This is the gold standard because it allows for infinitely nuanced capture and immediate corrective feedback free from technology constraints. The downside, of course, is that it requires learners to be able to gather in a face-to-face setting. If instructors can’t be present, learners can record their role-playing sessions and upload them for instructor review. Creating clear, detailed rubrics—ideally, rubrics that include references to worked examples that model grading criteria—enables you to offer peer- and self-reviewed versions.
  • Role-playing online. Synchronous online meetings allow learners to participate in role-playing scenarios and review their peers in real-time. If you’re restricted to asynchronous delivery, role-play and peer reviews can be conducted by having learners get together synchronously on their own time (similar to a study group), then upload video clips and conduct instructor and peer reviews via a discussion board.
  • Mocked-up role play (scenarios). In 100 percent asynchronous environments, you can describe scenarios – the “word problems” of yesterday – using text and include them in an essay, short answer, or multiple-choice assessments. Depending on your content and goals, a more time-consuming alternative that may be more effective is to stage a video, upload it, and ask students to respond via essay or video reaction.

While soft skills can be tough to train, they’re the foundation of success in nearly every industry, from hospitality to retail and service. These two strategies will help you successfully train them online or off.