Dr Greg Walkerden, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Planning, writes about professional training at Macquarie:
Professional life depends on both special knowledge and skills – e.g. for planners, how to apply relevant legislation and policy when assessing a development proposal – and generalist skills – e.g. for planners, how to negotiate with colleagues and stakeholders, and how to work creatively to integrate multiple conflicting objectives in strategic planning.
Although specialist skills might seem the most obvious and important skills to learn, in professional life it’s far more often depth in generalist skills that mark out really effective professionals (cf. Donald Schön’s work), and ‘soft’ skills are more important to employers than technical or ‘hard’ skills when recruiting new graduates (Archer and Davison 2008).
A way to understand why this is so is to think of the ‘soft’ skills as a ‘platform’ that underpins use of technical skills and knowledge. In computing, an operating system is a ‘platform’ on which applications are built: the operating system handles displaying, sorting, calculating, etc and applications (apps) on mobiles and laptops make use of these underlying capacities. The situation with hard and soft skills is very similar. Technical expertise in social planning or environmental management is of limited use if it is not underpinned by skills in maintaining good working relationships with colleagues and other stakeholders.
Apart from their underlying importance, another reason why soft skills play such an important role differentiating aspiring and established professionals is that they are a lot harder to teach. Mintzberg (2004) makes the following comment about management in organisations – but it applies equally to planning, environmental management, and any socially complex profession:
Management is a practice that has to combine a good deal of craft, namely experience, with a certain amount of art, as vision and insight, and some science, particularly in the form of analysis and technique. But students without managerial experience lack the craft and have little basis for the art, and so programs to train them have relied on the science, and that’s what leaves a distorted impression of management.
Is Mintzberg’s conclusion the last word, however? If we take it as a challenge, we can flip it into a research question: how can university courses develop these soft skills effectively? Experimenting with ways to teach soft skills is fundamental to universities’ missions, in fact. At Macquarie, for example, all classes are designed to contribute to Graduate Capabilities – most of which are ‘soft’ skills (eg Effective Communication, Professional and Personal Judgement and Initiative) – and exploration of alternative ways of teaching soft skills is integral to what we do.
For professional disciplines specifically, such as planning and environmental management, developing new ways of teaching soft skills is part of the profession’s research and development. When, in universities, we formalise this work, our teaching becomes part of our research work.
In our postgraduate Environmental Decision Making class, for example, which is one of our classes where students practice research skills, students undertake ‘reflective practice experiments’ (Walkerden 2009), exploring ways to develop these soft skills for themselves. To address the challenge of needing a setting to practice craft skills, and develop artistry, these experiments happen in the settings students already have to hand: their homes, workplaces, or other classes at Macquarie.
The majority of students focus on two key influencing skills: stakeholder analysis and negotiation. Working out how to organise cleaning in a shared house, finding more thoughtful ways to approach a negotiation with an employer about wages or conditions, and practicing negotiation skills in group work in another subject, are all popular settings in which to develop these platform skills. Because they are platform skills, creative appropriation of everyday life works well as a medium!
Experiments like this function at two levels. For the students, they are an opportunity to explore, formally, how innovations can be experimented with in practice traditions, and they develop their capacity for ongoing improvement as practitioners. For the teachers as researchers, they are an opportunity to explore ways that capacity can be built. For planning and environmental management, in particular, given the profound challenges we face, as societies, with finding a ‘sustainable’ relation to the places in which we live, this is an important research agenda.
groundwork 