Activities to improve personal development
Soft skills team
Dr. Arosha Adikaram – Deputy Coordinator Soft Skills
Dr. M. Ganeshamoorthy/Mr. M.T.M. Mahees: Arts
M. Vithanapathirana: Education
Mr. M.A.M. Hakeem: Law
Ruwangi Chandrasekara: Management & Finance
Prof. Manouri Senanayake/Dr. Asela Olupeliyawa: Medicine
Prof.P.V. Udagama: Science
Dr. Sugath Senerath: Sri Palee
Soft skills activities
Soft skills development was not a topic discussed much in the past. Therefore soft skills development was not very familiar to some of the academics in the university. Due to the objectives of the HETC-UDG project discussions were started in the academic circles and therefore helped to raise awareness about the importance of the development of soft skills in undergraduates. This awareness itself is an achievement since academics in future have this in mind when designing course units.
Under the Soft skills development component of the UDG project, each faculty of the University of Colombo hired a consultant to incorporate soft skills development components to the existing curricula. Faculties of Arts, Education, Law, Medicine, Management & Finance and Science completed the consultancies and the academics are happy about the changes introduced to improve the soft skills of the undergraduates. Since the final year students are not going to be benefitted much from this curriculum revision, a series of workshops were conducted to improve relevant soft skills development in them with either the hired consultant or resource persons with in the University system. Since the soft skills development is going to be one of the important aspect to be developed in the graduates faculties of Arts, Science, Management & Finance and Sripalee campus established soft skills development centres and equipped them through the UDG project. These facilities will be used for the purpose of soft skills development in the future. Embedding soft skills development components in the curriculum itself does not help in developing soft skills in the undergraduates, and the trainers also has to be trained on this aspect. Therefore train the trainer workshops were conducted in most of the faculties for the academic staff to train them in methods of soft skills development.
Sustainability of some of the activities such as workshops for the development of soft skills was considered towards the end of the project. A video competition was held in the Faculty of Management & Finance on soft skills development. The three winning videos are to be used in the future for soft skill development in the faculty. These videos are going to be shared among other faculties as well.
The link to the blog about the video competition held under soft skills for Faculty of Management & Finance
