Practicing and Evaluating Soft Skills in IT Capstone Projects

Abstract

Information technology (IT) professionals have constantly stressed the importance of soft skills and used them as a key factor in hiring and career development. The soft skills are often difficult to be practiced and evaluated in IT curriculum, specifically in a subject or a skill focused course. We took on the challenge in an IT capstone course where students complete a term-long real-world team project. We redesigned the IT capstone course to systematically embed soft skill requirements in the team project, facilitate the training of soft skills, and evaluate students' soft skill competences. In this paper, we present our experiences and findings on curriculum improvement and students' soft skills development and assessment.