The Impact of Soft Skills Intervention on TVET Students: Evidence from Pre- and Post-Survey Analysis

Despite possessing the technical competencies required by industry, many TVET graduates continue to face employability challenges due to underdeveloped essential soft skills such as communication skills, negotiation, critical thinking, working in a team, innovation, problem solving, managing stress, presentation, time management and adapting to change. This gap contributes to job mismatches, reduced workplace productivity, and difficulties in adapting to dynamic work environments. As employers increasingly value graduates who demonstrate both technical and soft skills, targeted training programmes have become essential to strengthen soft skills among TVET students. Despite increasing efforts to strengthen soft skills among TVET students, limited empirical evidence exists regarding the effectiveness of short-term soft-skills intervention programmes in enhancing communication and listening, teamwork, and problem-solving competencies. Therefore, this study evaluates the effectiveness of a short-term soft-skills intervention programme using a pre-test and post-test survey approach involving 42 TVET students. The findings revealed statistically significant improvements in communication and listening, teamwork and problem-solving skills following the intervention programme (p < 0.001). Moderate to large effect sizes were observed across all dimensions, with problem-solving skills demonstrating the greatest improvement (d = 0.94), followed by communication and listening (d = 0.87) and teamwork skills (d = 0.60). These findings suggest that short-term soft-skills interventions can effectively enhance students' interpersonal competencies and contribute to greater workplace readiness and employability

TVET, communication and listening skills, teamwork skills, problem-solving skills

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