Soft skills training has become imperative in a fast changing and liberalized economy like India. The employment prospects of the present-day youth are inextricably bound with their awareness of globally relevant soft skills and ability to speak English. In the process of inculcating and acquiring soft skills, the pertinent questions to be answered are: Are we relegating our own culture to the background? Are we in the danger of losing our moorings and landing in the lap of another cultural hegemony, barely six decades after freeing ourselves from one? This paper seeks to raise some doubts regarding the long-term fallouts of the western-style soft skills training and endeavors to find a middle ground which can satisfy the urgent need for globalization and also help prevent the undue marginalization of our local cultures. There is an urgent need to revamp our training modules and inject local cultural reality into them to ensure that we produce a young workforce which is empowered with both global skills as well as indigenous culture.

Today, soft skills figure prominently in syllabi across the educational spectrum. From undergraduate curricula to B-School programs, from elitist high school time tables to vocational training center schedules, soft skills training scores high on educators’ and recruiters’ agenda alike. Soft skills modules are interwoven, often, with language curricula or placement programs. Short-term training sessions are planned, experts are hired, in-house faculty is trained, reading lists are drawn up, libraries are stocked, online resources are located and increasingly, of late, outbound training camps are arranged. In short, no stone is left unturned in an effort to give trainees the best in globally relevant soft skills in order to enhance their employability quotient. This agenda, if left unfinished in any way, is completed by training departments of the employing companies.

However, in our quest to impart these all-important skills among our youth, are we forgetting one highly significant factor—that of our cultural context which varies greatly from the context from which we often borrow our training material? Are we inadvertently opening up our cultural space to outside influences without thinking about the longterm consequences of such actions?

Soft Skills Journal, Soft Skills Training, Indian Context, Cultural Hegemony, B-School programs, Global Resources, Soft Skills Training, The Trainers’ Dilemma, The Politics of Development.