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Cracking the code of soft skills
With remote working and the rise of artificial intelligence, it is crucial that employees have effective communication skills and the ability to think critically. Yes, we are talking about soft skills. By paying focused attention to soft skills and investing in training and development programmes, organisations can gain an edge in a competitive and fast-changing business environment. However, defining and measuring soft skills remains a challenge.
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Hanne Vermaerke (HIT)
Karolien Scheerlinck
Soft skills, hard to do without!
Karolien Scheerlinck is manager of the VDAB AI Center of Excellence. She is responsible for developing VDAB’s first Artificial Intelligence model “Distance to the labour market”.
This model is currently used to prioritise jobseekers according to their probability to find a job. The AI Center of Excellence has a track record of award-winning tools, such as our AI vacancy matching engine Jobnet and our orientation tool Jobreach.
Previous she worked as a research engineer at the Belgian railway company Infrabel and Be-Mobile.
Karolien Scheerlinck graduated from Ghent University in 2007 with a master’s degree in Bioscience Engineering and started a PhD at the department “Mathematical modelling, Statistics and Bioinformatics” with a focus on heuristic optimisation algorithms.
Karolien Scheerlinck
VDAB
Leen Verachtert
Soft skills, hard to do without!
Leen Verachtert is policy advisor at VDAB (public employment service Flanders).
In collaboration with the various Belgian public employment and training services ACTIRIS, ADG, Bruxelles Formation, Le Forem (united under the partnership SYNERJOB), VDAB developed and manages an occupational and competencies database, named Competent.
Both input from experts from the sectors and data & AI insights, are used to determine the evolutions of the Competent database.
Competent is used by the public employment and training service providers to develop services and is also available as an open data database (API’s) to all interested customers for the development of tools.
Leen is a real all-rounder when it comes to competence profiles, version management, database management, partnerships, etc.
Leen Verachtert
Policy advisor at VDAB
Soft skills, hard to do without!
Join us for an insightful presentation on the critical role of soft skills in today’s labor market. Discover how these essential interpersonal skills enhance communication, collaboration, and adaptability, making them vital for employability alongside technical abilities. We will explore the importance of self-awareness and assessment of soft skills, the need for a common language to discuss them, how we use Artificial Intelligence to keep our language up to date and support effective training strategies for development. This presentation aims to equip job seekers and employers with the knowledge to recognize, strengthen, and apply soft skills for greater success in the workplace. Don’t miss this opportunity to unlock your potential!
Maxim Hammel
Learning in the Flow of Life
Maxim works as a Coach for GoodHabitz, a role in which he supports partner organizations that have adopted the online learning platform to find the ideal strategy to make learning a virtue.
Maxim Hammel
GoodHabitz
Learning in the Flow of Life
In a world that is constantly changing, personal development is often overlooked, despite the essential role it plays. Finding time in the middle of work and life is crucial – but is it all about productivity and workload? Explore with us strategies to seamlessly integrate (online) learning into the flow of life, with a focus on understanding human behavior in the quest for personal growth.
Paul Diepenbrock
Developing critical thinking as a skill in the age of AI
Paul, in his current role as a Learning Specialist, is responsible for shaping and implementing Cevora’s educational strategies and tools. His diverse background in education, and particularly andragogy, includes experience as a corporate trainer and a 360-view practice as a language instructor.
Paul Diepenbrock
Cevora
Developing critical thinking as a skill in the age of AI
The temptation to blindly trust AI output is strong. We tend to look for arguments in support of our opinions and we do everything to avoid, ignore or minimise counterarguments. The ability to analyse information, separate facts from interpretations and make informed decisions is central to our interaction with AI technology. In this presentation, we will take you through the importance of this skill and share Cevora’s vision on how to develop it.
Mark Van Achter
Applying game-based team learning to experience and master soft skills
Prof. dr. Mark Van Achter invents, develops and markets innovative LearnTech solutions.
With “Strides”, he launched a world-pioneering learning tool uniquely allowing to make soft skills tangible. A one-hour cooperative gaming session yields an automated report on the individual members’ contributions and the way they effectively interact in a team. Strides is currently actively used by several large-scale companies to gamify the employee experience. Applied use cases include recruiting & pre/onboarding young graduates, team-based learning on individual soft skills, inclusive feedback culture, DEI awareness and leadership training. Strides fosters an innovative learning culture in the entire organization, thus raising engagement and retention.
At KU Leuven, Mark is running valorization projects on soft skills to resolve open questions in business practice. These include a project to efficiently capture company culture in the recruiting process using a top-down/bottom-up AI approach, and a project on the value of game-based team learning to calibrate and train soft skills.
On the educational front within KU Leuven, Mark is committed to improve the employability skills of graduating students and young professionals. He is currently running pilots applying game-based learning techniques to allow students to experience and master essential management skills. Allowing to reach results which are unattainable using traditional learning techniques.
Mark Van Achter
Strides
Applying game-based team learning to experience and master soft skills
University training is heavily focused on providing students deep knowledge and technical skills. Yet, in the emerging creative AI age, this is just a fraction of the skills and abilities that will be essential in their careers. More than ever, team-based efforts will become the prime determinant of business success. Implying companies need to invest in essential soft skills to keep their workforces employable. In this session, we take this problematic imbalance between intellectual and social skills as a starting point, to explore what learning methodologies could be used to alter it. We will particularly zoom in on experiental game-based learning, and explore what makes cooperative games so uniquely valuable in creating psychologically safe training spaces. Bridging towards practice, we will discuss concretely applied learning cases, ranging from young professionals all the way up to C-level. To show how cooperative game experiences such as Strides are used to facilitate topics such as onboarding young graduates, awareness on individual soft skills in a team setting, inclusive feedback culture, psychological safety / DEI awareness and leadership training. We will also highlight how business coaches benefit from this amazing experimental laboratory.
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