Antecedents of Soft-Skills in Higher Education Institutions of Saudi Arabia Study under COVID-19 Pandemic

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) play an important role in development of productive academic environment for university graduates. Similarly, soft skills are an essential requirement for fresh graduates to provide and prepare them for the convenient and suitable job market. In last few months, emerging situation of COVID-19 has affected the Saudi higher education sector at large scale from business perspective by diverting the regular studies to online classes. Online classes have made it more difficult for academic staff to cope up with this deteriorating situation. This study is planned to identify numerous soft-skills, which could be important to conduct academic activities under COVID-19 crisis. Study will make an analysis focusing on the importance of soft-skills in higher education institutions before and after the COVID-19 crisis. Study collected data from both public and private sector higher educational institutions located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Study observed the key role and overall impact of soft-skills to enhance the learning aptitudes under uncertain COVID-19 situation. Study will also focus on the importance of soft-skills in job success in the Saudi job market for university graduates. Study will also focus on the importance of soft-skills integration in higher education curriculum. Study will help the decision makers to plan and prepare accordingly for developing academic environment to get better job opportunities in the competitive Saudi business organizations.


Introduction
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) play a key role in the development of modern education standards. HEIs are responsible in developing and maintaining a high level of academic curriculum equipped with most modern learning tools and skill. In this regards, HEIs must identify and develop set of important soft-skills and attributes to integrate into the academic curriculum of different study fields in higher education sector. These soft-skills can help the university graduates for a better candidate in the Saudi job market (Redha Al Abduwani, 2012). The main objective of the study is to identify the measures that how Saudi higher education institutions can improve the learning process under COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, how university graduates can be benefited in this uncertain situation by learning the proposed important soft-skills (Sharma, 2019). Business organizations have been already reporting that they need to conduct special training sessions for fresh graduates to learn and adapt the business requirements (Tang, 2020). Keeping this in view, study will contribute to enhance the importance of soft-skills to address the competitive job market concerns. Study will focus on the integration of proposed soft-skills in the higher education curriculum for different field of studies. Study will maintain a level of coordination in incorporating the course objectives, learning outcomes in accordance with the job market requirements to further strengthen the curriculum. Following is the detail of the research objectives and Saudi market problem:

Problem Statement
COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the regular studies paradigm to online studies using different online tools like (Zoom, 2020; https://zoom.us/), (Webex, 2020; https://www.webex.com/), (Moodle, 2020; https://moodle.com/), (WizIQ, 2020; https://www.wiziq.com/) and (Blackboard, 2020;https://www.blackboard.com). It has also affected the Saudi higher education sector at large scale from business perspective to academic activities progression. This study is planned to identify important soft skills, which could help the academic environment to perform better in the uncertain COVID-19 pandemic crisis. University graduates have an issue of being not prepared for the job market and most of them need trainings as they join the competitive job market. This is mostly happening in the engineering and technical study areas, where more focus is on technical skills instead of focusing on working environment skills. Study will address and focus on the importance of soft-skills to be integrated in the university curriculum in different study fields at higher education institutions.

Research Objective
Study will particularly focus on higher education institutions of Saudi Arabia under this uncertain situation of COVID-19 pandemic. Study will observe and identify the important soft-skills before and after the pandemic situation. Study will focus particularly on the fresh university graduates to cope up with the job market requirements by learning and adapting the proposed soft-skills. Further-A. Malik, W. Ahmad DOI: 10.4236/ce.2020.117086 1154 Creative Education more, study will assess and evaluate the importance of the soft-skills in HEIs curriculum with emphasis on before and after COVID-19 situation. Finally, study will propose recommendations for integrating the proposed soft-skills in higher education curriculum.

Importance of Soft-Skills
University education is an ongoing process for developing and preparing the university graduates for the competitive job market. Saudi higher education ministry is providing international standard opportunities and services to university students in their respective study fields. Soft-skills are playing a vital role in personality development of university graduates and known to form the personality traits, attitudes, career attributes, social intelligence and emotional intelligence quotients. This will enable them to communicate better, perform efficiently and cooperate well with others in a professional business environment (Melluso et al., 2020). Since the COVID-19 pandemic has disturbed the normal way of education, new ways and means of education has been introduced during this short period of time. Saudi higher education in compliance with the universities and colleges is ready to equip the graduates with modern education standards (Tang, 2020). The graduates must understand and learn the soft-skills knowledge effectively to get them ready to be placed in the job market. In modern times, academic education and soft-skills keep changing as per the work environment and market demands. At the same time, business organizations are complaining about the university graduates in terms of lack in soft-skills learning. They feel that they have to arrange training sessions for fresh graduates to prepare them for the job market. This argument is mostly focused on engineering and technical field of studies, as they feel that soft-skills are not part of their regular studies. This looks correct as engineers are technical professionals and they don't get involved with management and business operations but modern business demands are changing as business needs are growing (Yaacoub, Husseini, & Choueiki, 2011). One of the most common criticism is regarding the communication skills like local, bilingual or trilingual languages of the graduate in Saudi job market (Sharma, 2019). On the other side general academic programs such as Arts, Design and Business Administration put more emphasis on learning and adopting the soft-skills during the studies (Chondekar, 2019). However, during the COVID-19 pandemic situation, it has become more important for the university graduates to learn and adopt the soft-skills. It has become difficult for both faculty members and students to handle the current academic situation as its online not on regular basis. Both will require a more solid and applied evidence of implementing academic standards in higher education institutions (Pomeroy, 2014). Hence, it is very important for higher education ministry, universities and colleges to integrate soft-skills in academic in COVID-19 pandemic situation.

Literature Review
Relevant literature is an important source of collecting the information for the research studies. The main objective is to determine the hypothesis for the current study. Soft-skills play an important role in developing the university graduates as per the job market requirements. These skills will help and prepare the graduates to look for the better and appropriate job in the saturated job market.
There are many soft-skills discussed and addressed in the previous studies but this study will focus on soft-skills in the uncertain situation of COVID-19. Researcher has reviewed the relevant literature and found some important soft-skills, which could add value to the university graduates in addition to the knowledge of the study field. It could also help the academicians to prepare and plan the best ways and means for the university graduates. These soft skills include, Creativity (CRT), it is known to generate original and unique ideas and provide solutions to resolve the issue (Sharma, 2019), Patience (PAT), is recognized to deal with different cultural environments, with different backgrounds, learning styles and intellectual abilities (Yaacoub, Husseini, & Choueiki, 2011), Persuasion (PER), is defined as convincing others to support your innovative ideas and solutions to take into practical actions (Tang, 2020), Organization (ORG), is known to make different class activities and assessments for ensuring a smooth grading process . These soft-skills have been addressed in different research studies as per the study requirements but this particular study will focus on the uncertain situation of COVID-19. This was already a difficult task and has become more tedious when there is a technological barrier between the academic staff and the students.

Research Methodology
For data collection, quantitative method has been adopted and non-probability based convenience data sampling technique is used for the current study as recommended by the research experts (Saunders, Lewis, & Thornhill, 2008

Analysis and Interpretation
For the purpose of analysis and data interpretation, researcher has performed descriptive analytical methods in accordance with study objectives and problem identified earlier. Different statistical measures like frequencies and averages were performed for the analysis purposes. Detail is given below:

Demographic Detail
Following graph (Figure 1) shows the overall demographic detail of the respondents, where each position is listed with female and male respondents. An online questionnaire was prepared using Google Docs to address the study objectives.

The Convergent Validity Analysis
According to Hair et al., convergent validity refers to the degree to a group of variables converge in measuring a particular concept. It can be established through the simultaneous testing of three criteria; Factor Loadings, Composite Reliability and Average Variance Extracted. As such, the entire items loadings were examined and confirmed where AVE must be >0.50 CR must be >0.70, Cronbach's must be >0.70 and Loadings must be >0.60. However, if all other criteria of measurement model fulfil the validity and reliability requirements, we can retain some item's loading even as low as 0.40 as an acceptable level (Hair, Babin, & Krey, 2017). The factor loadings were all significant with 0.01 level of significance, shown in Table 1. The values of Cronbach Alpha fall well above the thresh hold value while composite reliability values fall between 0.881 and 0.956 indicating that the latter values exceeded the recommended value of 0.70 (Nouf Rashed Al khater, 2017). Hence, results show the group of items AVE in relation to the variance shared with measurement errors. Specifically, AVE measures the variance encapsulated by indicators that relate to the assignable variance to the measurement errors. If the AVE value is 0.5, the set of items is deemed to have sufficient convergence in measuring the construct (Hair et al., 2014). The detail is given below in Table 1.  (Henseler, Ringl, & Sarstedt, 2014). The detail is given below in Table 2.

The Path t-Values
First of all, data is tested by evaluating the path t-values which are provided by the bootstrap routine. These values indicate the significance levels of each path and thereby the strength of support for the proposed hypothesis (Willis, 2018). job-market and integration at higher education curriculum before and after the COVID-19 crisis. The detail is given below in Table 3.
A. Malik, W. Ahmad tions of Saudi Arabia must reconsider the integration of soft-skills in all study majors to enhance an improve the course objectives and learning outcomes as per the requirements of the job market during the COVID-19 crisis. In addition to this, role of soft-skills is very imperative in modern academic environment as it helps the university graduates to learn and apply the knowledge to real life situations in their work environment.