Soft Skills Enhancement Research Training Course for Postgraduate Students

Introduction

Postgraduate studies are quite challenging, particularly during research proposal preparations, data analysis and report writing. Postgraduate students  doing research degrees without coursework i.e. doctoral students and Masters by theses students experience more difficulties in undertaking research activities. Students need to be trained on ‘soft skills’ to help them overcome the hurdles of undertaking research and writing their reports. Most of the content coverage in the research methodology course concentrates on hard skills and very little is covered on soft skills. The proposed short training is based on the fact that, our student and members of academic staff lack simple but significant soft skills; for example to generate a table of content automatically, how to use drop box, presentation skills and the like. This has been exhibited where hard skills in the PhD report cannot be realized because of lack or poor soft skills to make their work more reader friendly. Knowledge and small soft skills are those skills and knowledge to be provided to the postgraduate students on various aspects related to thesis writing and research undertaking.

Objectives

The main objectives of these short courses are as follows

2.1       To instill research and publication skills for postgraduate students (PhD and Masters by thesis)

2.2       To put in place a mechanism that will oblige student to attend at least more than fifty percent of these courses before presenting their proposal and thesis.  

2.3       To generate income from participants who will be interested to join the course workshops

The course contents will revolve around the following thematic areas, proposal writing skills, Research Methods, Writing a research report (thesis), Advanced Presentation skills, Dissemination of research Results, Research Ethics.