Building Soft Skills for Employability Challenges and Practices in Vietnam

This book is among the first of its kind to comprehensively examine the implementation of soft skills in universities in the developing country, Vietnam. The context is unique as the implementation is taking place within the distinctive socio-economic, cultural and political characteristics of the country, amidst several simultaneously-executed educational reforms. Tran lays down the foundation for discussion by providing readers with a comprehensive review of how soft skills implementation has come into existence in higher education across the globe, before diving into the implementation of soft skills in Vietnamese universities. He goes on to highlight the interesting differences in the conceptualization of soft skills between Vietnamese universities and those in the West. The book depicts and compares how university leaders and managers tackle contextual factors, submit to constraints enforced by political forces, and how they use institutional advantages available for implementation. It goes further to examine how personal and contextual factors affect teachers’ and students’ engagement with the implementation, and highlights the role of work-integrated learning and extra-curricular activities in developing soft skills for students. Finally, the book investigates the contribution of external stakeholders, such as alumni, employers, skills experts, and local authorities, to the implementation and obstacles that prevent their participation. This book will be a valuable reference for the implementation of soft skills in higher education around the world.

Acknowledgement List of Tables 1 Introduction 2 The Surge of Developing Soft Skills for Students in Higher Education 3 Soft Skills Implementation in Higher Education: A literature Review 4 The Context of Soft Skills Implementation in Vietnamese Universities 5 Soft Skills Implementation Models in Vietnamese Universities 6 The Influence of Leadership on Soft Skills Implementation 7 Teaching Soft Skills: Teachers’ Beliefs, Behaviours and Influential Factors 8 Assessing Soft Skills in Vietnamese Universities: Practices and Challenges 9 Students’ Internship Experience, Employability Development and Influential Factors 10 Students’ Soft Skills Development via Participation in Extra-Curricular Activities 11 External Stakeholders’ Participation in Developing Soft Skills for Students 12 Students’ Participation and Engagement with Soft skills Development 13 Building Soft Skills for Employability: The Way Ahead Index

Tran Le Huu Nghia is currently teaching at Faculty of Education, Monash University (Australia). He is also an honorary researcher at Ton Duc Thang University (Vietnam). He worked eight years in the Vietnamese higher education sector prior to coming to Australia where he worked as a research fellow for Deakin University and Swinburne University of Technology. He completed the Master of Lifelong Learning: Policy and Management (2007-2009), a program coordinated by three prestigious European universities: Aarhus University (Denmark), Bilbao University (Spain) and Institute of Education (the United Kingdom). Then as an Endeavour Postgraduate Awardee (2012-2016), he completed his Ph.D., with a focus on higher education studies, at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has produced several research outputs, including articles in high impact journal such as Higher Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Teaching in Higher Education, Journal of Education and Work, and International Journal of Education Development. His research interests include teaching and learning for employability, teacher education, international education, and teaching English as a second language.