OCTOBER 2022

VOlUME 05 ISSUE 10 OCTOBER 2022
Moroccan Higher Education Teachers’ Perceptions of the Most Important Soft Skills for Employability
1Soukaina Aziz, 2Said Zaidoune
1,2Ben Msik Faculty of Humanities, Hassan II University Casablanca, Morocco
DOI : https://doi.org/10.47191/ijsshr/v5-i10-17

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ABSTRACT

Soft skills are career traits that individuals need to possess in order to be employable. These attributes include communication, problem solving, time management, teamwork, and ethics, to mention a few. The Moroccan Ministry of Higher Education has made different reforms in order to ensure the implementation and the development of soft skills and Bachelor Degree Reform of 2019 (BDR) is one of them. However, this reform was cancelled and the new minister of the Moroccan Higher Education and Scientific Research introduced a modified version of the LMD (Licence, Master, Doctorat) system to ensure the implementation of soft skills (Miraoui, 2022). Such modifications were made in order to ease the strain of the transition of Moroccan graduates into the job market. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain educators' perceptions of the critical nature of soft skills for employability in both Ben Msik's faculty of letters and humanities and Faculty of science. Ben Msik faculties’ educators were surveyed to assess the importance of specific soft skills and how these skills affect success in the workforce. Forty five educators from Ben Msik's department of Letters and Humanities and Ben Msik's faculty of Sciences in the Casablanca-Settat region of Morocco participated in this study. The data collection instrument was an online questionnaire. Results show that the majority of teachers deem the integration of soft skills in the higher education curriculum important for employability. Educators identified general communication, oral communication, problem solving and critical thinking, teamwork and professionalism and strong work ethic as the top five important soft skills to be integrated in the Moroccan higher education curriculum. General communication, problem solving and critical thinking, teamwork, presentation skills and responsibility were ranked as the top five most important soft skills for employability.

KEY WORDS:

Soft skills, Moroccan higher education, integration, curriculum, employability

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VOlUME 05 ISSUE 10 OCTOBER 2022

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