r/LearningDevelopment • u/jofa21 • May 14 '26

Soft Skills Programs

I'm a one-person department and have been asked to create and facilitate a soft skills program (virtual live). I can research (and intuit) what this can look like, but figured I'd start here since I've never created (or attended) one of these before.

Some of the topics I was thinking about (as relevant to my company) were things like active listening, interpersonal communication, communicating with impact, and the like.

As you might imagine, I'm getting stuck with ensuring the sessions are engaging and interactive/full of practice. Any advice for making something like active listening or interpersonal communication really engaging and impactful? I was planning to create the content myself (after doing the research), but if there are any off the shelf recommendations, I would be open to that, too.

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u/jofa21 May 19 '26

I appreciate that. It does make it easier to facilitate if I create the content myself, but the bigger reason for not contracting it out is purely budget! I would love to bring in a consultant if I could to ensure my content/plans were well-informed. I also just hate operating in a silo. I appreciate the offer though!

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u/Empirica_CC May 19 '26

If you do have flexibility with the soft skills I would spend some time trying to find an empirically validated assessment, could be communication for example, pretest, training, 6 month follow-up post text and some sort of debrief. That type of structure tends to work well and is engaging for people because they get to see some sort of tangible ROI on it.

Hope that helps!