An Initial Assessment of Soft Skills Integration in Emergency Remote Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Learners' Perspective.

Faculty members' soft skills are vital for developing students' knowledge, understanding, values, and skills. How teachers integrate soft skills with the subject matter influences how their students acquire the skills they need in their academic life and beyond. Soft skills are a key factor for students' success--not just in their academic work, but also in their careers. These skills are also highly sought by employers when recruiting new graduates. The main purpose of this study was to determine students' perceptions of soft skills integration in emergency remote learning (ERL) during the COVID-19 pandemic. A self-constructed questionnaire distributed through Google forms was used for data collection. Forty-three Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) first-year students from Southern Luzon State University (Philippines) participated in the study. It was found that most BSBA first-year students perceived that soft skills were moderately integrated during ERL. There was a mean of 3.16 for personal skills, 3.02 for character-building skills, and 2.95 for organisational skills. It was also found that there was no significant difference in students' perception of the integration of soft skills in emergency remote learning when the students were grouped according to gender and learning modalities. This paper suggests that further study should be conducted with a wider scope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]