Moroccan Higher Education Teachers' Perceptions of the Most Important Soft Skills for Employability

Soft skills are career traits that individuals need to possess in order to be employable. These attributes include
communication, problem solving, time management, teamwork, and ethics, to mention a few. The Moroccan Ministry of Higher
Education has made different reforms in order to ensure the implementation and the development of soft skills and Bachelor Degree
Reform of 2019 (BDR) is one of them. However, this reform was cancelled and the new minister of the Moroccan Higher Education
and Scientific Research introduced a modified version of the LMD (Licence, Master, Doctorat) system to ensure the implementation
of soft skills (Miraoui, 2022). Such modifications were made in order to ease the strain of the transition of Moroccan graduates into
the job market. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain educators' perceptions of the critical nature of soft skills for employability
in both Ben Msik's faculty of letters and humanities and Faculty of science. Ben Msik faculties’ educators were surveyed to assess
the importance of specific soft skills and how these skills affect success in the workforce. Forty five educators from Ben Msik's
department of Letters and Humanities and Ben Msik's faculty of Sciences in the Casablanca-Settat region of Morocco participated
in this study. The data collection instrument was an online questionnaire. Results show that the majority of teachers deem the
integration of soft skills in the higher education curriculum important for employability. Educators identified general
communication, oral communication, problem solving and critical thinking, teamwork and professionalism and strong work ethic
as the top five important soft skills to be integrated in the Moroccan higher education curriculum. General communication, problem
solving and critical thinking, teamwork, presentation skills and responsibility were ranked as the top five most important soft skills
for employability.