Rethinking Construction Curriculum: Towards a Standard Soft Skills Taxonomy
The construction industry demands people who are equipped with a high level of soft skills to increase the efficiency of work, processes, and technology. Existing content, definition, interpretations and approaches for soft skills used among construction stakeholders are not clear. This challenge contributes to a soft skills gap among construction graduates and hinders them from possessing the expected minimum soft skills level. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel construction related soft skills' taxonomy. A literature based discovery method is applied for 32 scholarly documents. Soft skills are extracted, reduced, classified and organized into 12 clusters that constitute the taxonomy. The classification decisions are based on the hidden knowledge across the documents, the experiential knowledge of the authors, and are further triangulated utilizing a survey with feedback from industry and several interviews with academia. The proposed taxonomy is used further to develop a theoretical framework intended to help academia to better integrate a soft skills in construction curricula. It is suggested that this taxonomy would pave the road towards a soft skills' standardization in future studies.