Today, India is emerging as a hot spot for foreign investors. With this has come a sudden upsurge of companies setting up shop in India to provide services to global customers. The focus now is on trained, technically strong and culturally adaptive human capital. While earlier, people rarely went beyond neighboring towns on work, today sky is the limit, throwing bigger challenges to managers. This has resulted in an overnight requirement of knowledge other than the technical kind -`Soft Skills'. This article highlights the importance of soft skills required in managers and the need for B-Schools to incorporate the same in their curriculum.

In today's competitive environment, it is not enough to be the best in your field, intellectually. Competency is only half of what you need to climb the ladder of success. The other half is the softer side of you-it's that part of you that will be liked, admired, trusted and remembered.

The coming of IT has revolutionized the Indian job market. The success in the IT front has thrown serious challenges on the human resource front too. The main reason for this sudden upsurge in human resources is explained by the fact that business today is moving away from the `manufacturing based' economy to services based economy, thereby making it the era of human resources. Landing the right job and sustaining the job in this highly competitive business world, greatly rests on two factors - performance and competency. `Competency', as brought out by some HRD theorists and practitioners is a cluster of skills and attitudes, which not only affects a major part of one's job, but also correlates to performance on the job and can be improved through training and development.

Every employee joins an organization for two reasons - to create value for the company as well as achieve career progression, both of which affect the bottom line of an organization. The challenge faced by companies today in finding the right candidate lies in finding one with the right blend of what we call task-oriented competencies or hard skills and emotion-based competencies or soft skills. Coexistence of these two skills will undoubtedly, lead the individual to perform better, resulting in success. The crunch for manpower talent is so high and the need for soft skills so intense that human resource managers prefer to hire workers with a high level of soft competencies and then train them for the specific jobs available. What then are soft skills and where and why are they required?

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