Language peculiarities of "soft skills" in German electronic texts of vacancy advertisements

Abstract

In recent decades the attention of specialists has been attracted more and more to the so-called "soft skills", which supply "hard skills" and make possible the successful professional career. It has become especially distinct at the present day when the accelerated development of technologies takes place and personal skills become more and more significant. In connection with these issues "soft skills" become exceedingly worthy and there appear new research projects, considering these skills in psychological and methodological aspects. It is worth mentioning that due to certain peculiarities of soft skills there is no universal definition of them. In our research the definition presented in Wikipedia is used. The author makes an attempt to analyze soft skills from the point of view of the language. The research material is presented by soft skills, found in 100 texts of vacancy advertisements published at the specialized German website for job applicants. The objective of the research was lexical-syntactic analysis of soft skills. The use of continuous sampling method allowed to extract from each text soft skills, which were considered based on different criteria. Soft skills were classified according to German realities into such types as methodological, social and personal. The most frequently soft skills used in texts were identified and the thematic areas of their use were defined. From the point of view of their compositional structure the majority of soft skills are mainly presented by enumeration, the smaller part of them finds their position in extended sentences. In conclusion the results of the conducted work are formulated. The analysis of soft skills in vacancy advertisement texts revealed that the only high potential way is the use of nouns. The knowledge of preferable skills may help in composition of "effective" advertisement texts as well as in identifying the features of character that need working out to become capable in professional sphere.