Developing Emotional Intelligence

Every May, I get an opportunity to review the work of clever creatives. Many of them will enter the workforce with very polished skills. They demonstrate those proficiencies in formal presentations and during reviews where we see their work projected onto walls or display on computer screens.

But these young people often approach graduation without the mindset of a professional seeking a career. They don’t have the requisite soft skills that will ensure that they slot into a dynamic employment setting.

I’ve heard some of these young people explain that working on interpersonal skills is actually a detraction from focusing on more important technical skills. These kinds of thoughts epitomise a lack of emotional intelligence.

Developing emotional intelligence means learning how to collaborate. It means adapting to changing environments. It involves evolving as a communicator.

I sit in a small segment of curriculum developers who want to teach students the fundamentals of self-regulation and time management. I know I need to work harder at providing faster feedback to assigned tasks so students can become more attuned to the need to develop better self-discipline. These are the sorts of things that help a student cultivate the correct mind set needed in the working world.

But it’s often an internal battle trying to carve out respect for the development of soft skills as part of a third level curriculum. Bigger pots of funding come quicker to programmes that feature deep dives into technical subjects. So we articulate ways to develop increasingly sophisticated tech skills with little or no awareness of the complementary emotional intelligence factor.

For if we truly want to produce an astute and technically competent graduate, we should ensure that graduate has an innate capability to learn. And if that spirit of wanting to learn to learn is part of a graduate’s profile, we can be certain that the newly trained graduate will be able to adapt to a fresh environment as strong contributors to creative teams.