Klaipėdos universitetas

Employers currently emphasise primarily the importance of the personal and social characteristics of employees, and focus less on their professional and business skills. Contrarily, employees often consider deep professional knowledge and skills to be their key strengths, and pay little attention to personal growth and the development of personal characteristics. The aim of the research is to compare the soft skills most frequently required by potential employers in job advertisements for the position of administrator to the employee soft skills predominantly identified by the students on the Tourism Administration course. A study designed to identify employer expectations was conducted in 2019 and 2021. In order to determine the opinions of students in 2021, a written questionnaire survey of higher education students on the Tourism Administration course was conducted. The analysis of the opinions of students, and an examination of employer expectations, demonstrate that employer expectations regarding the skills of potential employees, especially personal or soft skills, and student opinions, do not always match. The impact of the pandemic created a paradoxical situation in the labour market: before the pandemic, progressively more attention was being paid to employees’ soft skills; in the post-pandemic world and working in a hybrid way in the labour market, not all personal skills remain important.

This article offers an analysis of soft skills acquisition in children through animal training programmes within the framework of a two-year Erasmus+ project. The article overviews important aspects of shaping and introducing new approaches towards the acquisition of soft skills in children through animal training programmes. In this context, children participated in research in three countries (Lithuania, Belgium and Bulgaria), in three animal-assisted educational programmes: dolphin-assisted therapy, hippotherapy, and canine therapy. The results of the narrative analysis show a significant improvement in the skills of children, improving the quality of their relationships with themselves, with others, with animals, and with the environment. This reaffirms that exposing students to authentic, hands-on experience can significantly enhance their cognitive, social and emotional development. Moreover, the article shows that the process also increased the soft skills of teachers and of external actors involved in the process, reinforcing the importance of an open schooling approach as a way of improving all society. The article contributes to empirical evidence to support the integration of experiential learning into the pedagogical realm.