2023-05-19 04:00:04
Author of a thesis on the professionalization of university studies in France, researcher Laurène Le Cozanet observed how the notions of “skills”, including soft skills or “soft skills”, gradually entered college. It recalls the long period of transformation of universities, reformed to adapt to the economic realities of the country. A process that generates tension, particularly around the teaching of soft skills which some believe creates the illusion that students are prepared for the world of work. “What is called professional socialization is rather nourished by the alliance between the mastery of formal knowledge and the long period of experience”, emphasizes the politician.
When do you observe soft skills entering the faculty?
In the 2010s, French universities set up projects labeled soft skills, a concept coming from management to designate behavioral skills such as oral fluency or the ability to work in a team. But if this vocabulary is new, the approach is not: from the 2000s, the universities created modules supposed to make it possible to acquire “transversal skills” also called “savoir-être”. This is the result of the Bologna process, a European mechanism launched in 1998 whose aim was to harmonize higher education at EU level and to make it more readable by dividing it into blocks of competences. This competency-based approach is notably supposed to facilitate communication between the world of higher education and that of work.
In France, this process led to the LMD reform [licence, master, doctorat] which brought together all the university courses in the same legal framework and assigned a professional outcome to each one. At the same time, in 2002, it was decided to include all university courses in the new national directory of professional certifications, the RNCP, where all the diplomas for professional purposes in the country are described in terms of skills.
When does this dynamic of professionalization date back?
From the 1950s, continuing education emerged. It is supported by activists in popular education, pioneers in human resources management and senior civil servants who theorize the complementary contributions between knowledge, know-how and interpersonal skills. In 1958, an executive from the Renault factories, a figurehead of this movement, gave a speech on the “competence” of the employee who was well integrated into his company, which he described as a “happy conjunction” of “knowledge”, “skills” and “goodwill”. The idea that training is not just education is spreading.
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