Abstract— The shift from production to a service driven economy in recent years has increased the importance of soft skills among graduates in general and IT (Information Technology) in particular. While a decade ago the market requirements focused mainly on the candidate's technical expertise, currently there is an increased attention to the soft skills as well. This study that maps the real market soft-skills' requirements, was initiated due to employers' complains about the lack of soft skills among IT graduates. As part of the study 2000 IT classified advertisements that relate to IT professionals were analyzed. The study revealed that human interaction skills were high on the demand list (41.2% of the soft skills ads), common (or general skills) were in second place (22.8% of the ads), task interaction were third (20.2% of the ads) and organization skills were the least requested (15.8%).

Index Terms— IT soft skills, human interaction skills for IT.

Ilana Lavy and Aharon Yadin are with the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College (YVC), Yezreel Valley, 19300, Israel (e-mail: ilanal@yvc.ac.il, aharony@yvc.ac.il).

Cite: Ilana Lavy and Aharon Yadin, " Soft Skills – An Important Key for Employability in the "Shift to a Service Driven Economy" Era," International Journal of e-Education, e-Business, e-Management and e-Learning vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 416-420, 2013.