Eureka! Institutional Repository

In recent years, despite the presence of highly skilled technical staff, unemployment has plagued modern societies. According to business circle, the reasons are found in the fact that the prospective candidates lack basic skills related to a person’s overall behavior and responsibility. This finding led to further study of the subject and one of the dominant names given to these abilities is the term “soft skills”. Soft skills are a cluster of non-technical skills that, although the competency levels at them cannot be quantitatively measured, as with hard skills, however, their absence is immediately apparent, both in personal and professional life of a person. For this reason, studies on soft skills and the most appropriate ways of introducing them into education, have taken place. Although many remarkable steps have been taken internationally in this direction, in Greece only a few years ago this concern has surfaced. The present paper initially reviews soft skills in the literature, looking for possible ways to introduce them into the Greek educational system in the form of an educational innovation. With this in mind, a survey was conducted on active educators to investigate their views on soft skills, as well as their most preferred method of introducing soft skills into education. The results show that the current situation is not particularly fruitful for the immediate and successful introduction of soft skills in education, but several refinements are needed. These innovative changes, despite the initial discomfort they may cause, are nevertheless expected to offer significant benefits and advantages in the future, both at individual and collective levels, leading the Greek education system to a new dimension.