Worklife interaction skills

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support its vital resources. All employees .... The requirement list for soft skills of Finnish companies is longer and includes almost 50 % .... emphasized: “Our IT helpdesk needs to constantly solve problems and find solutions for them. They.
Chydenius, T. & Gaisch, M. (2015). Worklife Interaction Skills: An exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry. In Proceedings Cross-Cultural Business Conference 2015. School of Management, Steyr Campus, pages 315325

Worklife interaction skills: an exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry Tarja Chydenius & Martina Gaisch Laurea University of Applied Sciences, Finland University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg, Austria ABSTRACT Being able to interact effectively and efficiently in the networked professional environments appears to be a crucial skill for junior jobseekers. Graduates possessing these skills can markedly increase their possibilities of being hired. A sample analysis on recruitment ads revealed that interaction skills are of paramount importance in the ICT industry. In view of the scarcity of terminological definitions, the authors of this paper seek to make a cross-cultural comparison on the scope and definition of interactional skills required in the sector at hand. The data is gathered by means of open-ended questionnaires and interviews in which first year ICT students from Austria and Finland define their understanding of worklife interaction skills. The wide variety of responses was clustered by subsuming particulars into general categories (see Miles, Huberman & Saldana 2014, 279-286). In parallel, recruitment staff was interviewed to shed light on their perceptions of the necessity and definition of interaction skills for future ICT employees. Preliminary findings suggest that there are many similarities in the Finnish and Austrian definitions for worklife interaction skills. Both student groups appear to be highly aware of the necessity of T-shaped graduates, placing a heavy emphasis on generic skills. However, while Finnish ICT students connect interaction skills strongly with communication, listening and social skills, Austrian students adhered more societal values such as reliability, punctuality and dedication to interaction skills per se. Interestingly, and although pointed out by a number of recruitment ads and employers, neither student group identified intercultural competence being a central skill set of worklife interaction skills. However, in view of the interconnectivity of the ICT field which is increasingly performing on a global stage, it is important for future employees to understand the various demands of interacting in an intercultural setting. Key words: worklife interaction skills, ICT, cross-cultural, Austria, Finland

1

INTRODUCTION

Computer graduates with good interaction skills can markedly increase their chances of finding jobs in the ICT field. Their future jobs are typically done in group constellations that embrace people from interdisciplinary fields and international settings, and often require knowledge in intercultural project management due to close co-operation with customers, suppliers and co-workers. Hence, there seems to be no doubt about the rising demand for interaction skills for future ICT specialists. The sample interviews of recruitment staff within the ICT sector are in line with Rouse's (2014) statement that "IT organizations aim to employ individuals possessing both hard and soft skills. However, the demand for the latter is increasing, especially among

Chydenius, T. & Gaisch, M. (2015). Worklife Interaction Skills: An exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry. In Proceedings Cross-Cultural Business Conference 2015. School of Management, Steyr Campus, pages 315325 those in IT leadership roles. This demand is due to a "soft skills gap" as well as the increasing need to align IT with business goals." A recent study conducted by the Finnish Union of professional business graduates (see Mikkonen 2012), which included 181 ICT BBA graduates, revealed that interaction skills are, indeed, very much needed in their work (56 % of respondents claim that these skills are needed very much). At the same time, however, only 3 % of the interviewees stated that they had developed a sufficient level of such skills during their studies. A lot of interaction skills were needed from 38 % of the respondents while 33 % considered that they had substantially developed these skills during their studies. There seems to be a clear gap between the interaction skills' need at work and their development during studies: further 49 % claimed that throughout their education these skills could be moderately developed while altogether 89 % stated that they required these skills a lot or very much at their work (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Interaction skills developed during education and needed at work, Finnish ICT bachelors’ survey 2013 (Mikkonen 2012). There seems to be a wide agreement that ICT employees need to have good interactional skills. The need for a high level of emotional intelligence and soft skills among IT professionals was also identified by Lewis et al (2008). An Austrian study (Riedl and Zwettler, 2014) revealed the increasing significance attributed to soft skills among IT experts among which

Chydenius, T. & Gaisch, M. (2015). Worklife Interaction Skills: An exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry. In Proceedings Cross-Cultural Business Conference 2015. School of Management, Steyr Campus, pages 315325 qualities such independence, motivation and readiness for action were rated to be most valuable. The purpose of this paper is to investigate closer what the needed interaction skills actually are for the ICT Bachelor graduates. The wide variety of definitions and no international agreement on what these skills actually are bring an additional challenge to the work. We are further interested to explore whether the gap between the required and actual skills lay in the fact that students and employers define them differently.

2

INTERACTION SKILLS IN ICT POSITIONS: DEFINITIONAL CLARITY

The major challenge with the term "worklife interaction skills" is that there seem to be no common understanding what these skills include, thus meaning different things to different people. Alternative terms used very similarly are for example “communication competence”, "interpersonal communication", "soft skills", "interrelationship skills“, „social skills", or "people skills". These concepts seem to include similar and subjective descriptions of activity that takes place between two or more people with the aim to build social connectivity or support achieving tasks at work.

2.1

Interactional skills, communication and soft skills

The terms “interaction skills”, “communication” and “soft skills” are often used interchangeably. Communication is traditionally defined as receiving and sending messages. Without going deeper in the various and more versatile concepts of human and organizational communication, van Riel and Fombrun (2007, p 1) define organizational communication as being the “lifeblood” of all organizations, where individuals communicate within the organization to support its vital resources. All employees should possess good communication skills in order to make their workplaces successful. Shockley-Zalabak (2009, p 22) defines communication competence as a complex set of “knowledge, sensitivity, skills and values” and includes in this skills set also many similar elements to the soft skills defined by Robles (2012, p 453). He defines soft skills as interpersonal qualities, also known as people skills, and personal attributes, including integrity, communication, courtesy, responsibility, social skills, positive attitude, professionalism, flexibility, teamwork, and work ethic. Rouse (2014) adds personality traits such as optimism, integrity and a sense of humor, and abilities that can be practiced, such as leadership, empathy, communication and sociability to these skills. Robles (2012, p 463) found that communication, integrity, and courtesy were the most important interpersonal skills for success. Valkonen (2003) defines interaction competence as knowledge of communication behaviour in general, i.e. metacognitive competence to foresee, plan and evaluate one’s own communication behaviour and competence to act in an appropriate manner in interaction contexts, thus claiming that interaction competence is a subordinate concept to communication competence. Niinistö-Sivuranta (2013, p 72) argues that communication skills is the hyponym, composed of interaction and listening skills in addition to written and spoken communication skills. In this paper, we prefer to use the term "worklife interaction skills" to describe a skillset that goes beyond sheer communicative effectiveness while at the same time not embracing personal characteristics. They define observable units of social behaviour employed when communicating intentions for the purposes of coordinated interaction with one's interlocutor. Con-

Chydenius, T. & Gaisch, M. (2015). Worklife Interaction Skills: An exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry. In Proceedings Cross-Cultural Business Conference 2015. School of Management, Steyr Campus, pages 315325 sequently, they embrace social exchange and social (verbal and nonverbal) reciprocity with others in a professional setting. For Neef (2008) they include among others teamwork, mentoring, leadership, networking and interpersonal skills. The knowledge of context-sensitive professional practice appears to be a crucial enabler for effective task completion. Future ICT employees will be working in many different types of positions within knowledge-intensive organizations where workplace relationships need to be well managed and which take a broad scope of forms and functions both internally and externally.

2.2

Definition of knowledge base

Much thought has been given to the different shapes of professionals, be it with regard to extensive expertise in one specific field (I-shaped), or regarding comprehensive knowledge in two areas pointing to a hybrid expert (H-shaped). Then again, the T-shaped professional appears to possess in-depth knowledge in one field while at the same time drawing on decent know-how in a number of other areas. Finally, the so-called dash-shaped professional tends to cover a good breadth of generalist knowledge without being a deep specialist in one specific area. The role assumed by dash-shaped professionals is often found in effective communication (see Donofrio et al, 2010). Interaction or communication skills are often considered as generic core skills which can be transferred from one field or profession to another. However, Niinistö-Sivuranta (2013) claims that interaction (or communication) skills are to a great extent an industry or profession specific skill. As seen in previous section, interaction skills can include a wide set of various skills such as networking, mastering different written communication genres, knowledge of using appropriate communication channels, competence of communication field specific knowledge, digital interaction, thus making it evident that this skills set is likely to be very field specific. Until recently, there has been little doubt that the ICT industry - in line with the prevailing Information Age- requires knowledge workers that are proficient in one expert area, namely computer science. While experts can be understood as persons with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject area that know the solution to a given issue, specialists tend to be able to solve these problems. It was found that expert performance involves ten years of deliberate practice and experience (Mauboussin, 2005) while expertise also embraces big-picture thinking and a sound understanding of the complexities of knowledge and its related components (Lambert and Clark, 1990). In this context, two forms of expertise have emerged, namely routine expertise and adaptive expertise (Bransford and al, 2005). Routine experts tend to apply acquired competencies with increased efficiency throughout their professional careers whereas adaptive experts are capable of dealing with problems in a flexible, innovative and more conceptual way. In any case, evidence suggests that a narrowly conceptualised understanding of IT job profiles no longer adequately responds to the requirements of the current labour market and that effective employees need to draw on a variety of qualifications and a skillset that extends that of hard facts.

Chydenius, T. & Gaisch, M. (2015). Worklife Interaction Skills: An exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry. In Proceedings Cross-Cultural Business Conference 2015. School of Management, Steyr Campus, pages 315325 2.3

Changing job requirements for IT staff

Anglo-American studies have been investigating job requirements for IT personnel for some decades now, which led to the categorisation of the following three computer-related job clusters: a) IT managers, b) system analysts and c) programmers (Cheney and Lyons, 1980). Over the years it was found that the job profile of IT experts was becoming increasingly complex and versatile (Gallivan et al, 2004).They identified that despite the ever-growing need for a broader and more T-shaped knowledge base, job ads still remained rather restrictive and focused on a hard skill-set portfolio. In contrast to Anglophone countries, the Germanic world was found to be less interested in the development of IT staff with only a few investigations looking into this research area (see Riedler and Zwettler, 2014; Arbogast and Keim, 2001; Grob and Lange, 1996). Yet, it was revealed that the key qualifications for IT personnel are on a constant flux with a growing significance in soft skills. While programming languages count among the most crucial hard skill requirements, dedication, readiness to invest effort and time, the willingness to work independently and an increased level of motivations were found to be typical Germanic soft skill features that were sought after among IT professionals (Riedl and Zwettler, 2014). This appears to be much in line with the so-called internalised control (Schroll-Machl, 2013) according to which Germans associate proficiency with reliability, strong willingness to outperfom as well as excellent time management. The Finnish ICT sector reports similar findings. According to a recent study highlights that besides the generic IT-skills (63%) also following generic skills and competences are much in demand: being self-initiative (53%), customer service skills (50%), problem solving skills (50%), ability to react to changes (47%), business knowledge (44%) and teamwork (44%), interaction and communication skills (38%) (Kilpeläinen, 2012).

3

RESEARCH DESIGN

The research design chosen for this explorative study included three phases. The aim was to find answers to the following questions: 1) what are current interaction skills required from ICT graduates? 2) How do students define interaction skills? 3) Are they different from the employers’ definitions? 4) Are there any differences in interaction skill definitions and demands between Austria and Finland? The last question was of special interest since many ICT positions demand global interaction. The first research question was tackled with scrutinising the first 20 relevant job ads in both Austria and Finland on a mutually agreed date (24 November, 2014 on monster.at and monster.fi) to find out what future employers predominantly looked for in an ICT professional. The ads were selected to be for positions available for the BBA ICT students after their graduation. This review should also help to find cross-cultural differences and/or similarities among the job profile of computer experts that are likely to enter the international labour market. In a second step, Bachelor ICT students from Austria and Finland were questioned how they define worklife interaction skills. Both student groups were instructed identically in a class setting. They were asked to write on paper as many characteristics as possible that they identified with such skills area. These characterizations were then collected on a spreadsheet and clustered in related groups. To improve the reliability of this study part, both author’s clustered the characteristics first independently and discussed differences for a joint conclusion. In a third step, Austrian and Finnish managers responsible for recruitment of ICT professionals were interviewed to reveal their underlying expectations with respect to the job qualifica-

Chydenius, T. & Gaisch, M. (2015). Worklife Interaction Skills: An exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry. In Proceedings Cross-Cultural Business Conference 2015. School of Management, Steyr Campus, pages 315325 tions. Particular focus was placed on their perception of worklife interaction skills for future ICT graduates. These sample in-depth interviews lasted between 20-40 minutes and were carried out with three male recruiting experts (two Austrian and one Finnish) and two female Finnish HR managers. All interviews included the same set of questions and were taperecorded and transcribed. By means of a qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2010; 2004) patterns were detected and inductive category development was promoted.

4

FINDINGS

Since this investigation was conducted in a three-phase mixed-methods triangulation process to yield the most promising results, the following findings are also presented in three steps. To begin with, both Austrian and Finnish ICT - related job ads were scrutinised. In a next step, results of the student questionnaires were compared and related to the literature before a close-up view was taken on how important HR managers perceive worklife interaction skills and whether they consider them to be a major toolkit for information workers. 4.1 Job ads The job ad comparison revealed that both Austrian and Finnish companies hiring ICT experts put substantial emphasis on spoken and written language skills in English and in the native languages (table 1). While Austrian companies did not seek for any other language proficiency than German and English, in a few Finnish ads other languages were found to be an asset. Team skills (which are clustered in line with requirements such as cooperative, team players) are also very high up on the list of both recruitment service sites. The same goes for communication skills which were found to be much sought after in both countries. In the Finnish ads these kinds of skills were either associated with communication or interaction skills which is further evidence for the thin and blurred line that is drawn between soft knowledge.

Table 1: Monster.au / .fi soft skills requirements for ICT related jobs on November 24, 2014 AUSTRIAN ADS Language skills (English) German skills Team skills Communication Reliability Flexibility Customer relations Analytical thinking Service-minded Socially competent Entrepreneurial spirit interculturally minded

FINNISH ADS 16 11 10 9 6 4 1 1 1 1 1 1

Language skills (mainly English) Finnnish skills Service-minded Team skills Customer relations Self-initiative, active Interaction skills Achievement oriented Communication skills Interculturally minded Proactive Presentation skills Independent

13 11 7 7 7 6 6 5 4 3 3 3 2

Chydenius, T. & Gaisch, M. (2015). Worklife Interaction Skills: An exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry. In Proceedings Cross-Cultural Business Conference 2015. School of Management, Steyr Campus, pages 315325 62

Organized Positive attitude Negotiation skills Sense of humor Stress-management Sales attitude See big picture Listening Documentation skills Flexibility Aptitude to learn new things

2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 91

In principle, it was not surprising that Austrian companies looking for ICT staff predominantly rated hard skills as the major prerequisites. However, a number of ads also included proficient language skills, in both German and English, as a key element of the job profile. What is striking, here again, is the number of ads that included reliability as a crucial ingredient in the Germanic professional toolkit. This strongly reminds of internalised control as a substantial societal feature where the willingness to be proficient and trustworthy appears to be deeply ingrained in the Austrian mindset. The requirement list for soft skills of Finnish companies is longer and includes almost 50 % more detailed soft skills type of qualifications than the Austrian job ads. Explaining this difference is out of the scope of this study, yet, as one employer representative hints, the reason may be in the fact that Finnish ICT employees represent typically a rather introvert and technologically oriented personality and it might be, therefore, be necessary to open up all the needed soft skills. Communication and interaction skills were mentioned separately in some Finnish ads. Some ads included just either one. This hints to the fact that the terms are differently conceptualized in Finland, the interaction skills being wider than the communication skills. It is also noteworthy that being able to manage customer relations is high up on the Finnish list but not mentioned in the Austrian list. This is again a very fuzzy concept and the category includes mentions such as being able to convince customers, evoke trust in customers, to find solutions to customer needs. However, it can also include skills such as being able to interact with customers and communicate effectively with them. This may be an area where there is special shortage of competence or it may also point to the fact that ICT personnel’s responsibility areas are expanding towards customer care and external communication in Finland.

4.2 Student questionnaires In Austria, 25 Bachelor students of the degree programme Communication and Knowledge Media and 32 Finnish students of the BBA degree in Business Information Technology responded to the following question: how do you define interaction skills and what qualities are vital to qualify for such skills? The results were gathered in a spreadsheet and clustered in related groups as exposed in

Chydenius, T. & Gaisch, M. (2015). Worklife Interaction Skills: An exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry. In Proceedings Cross-Cultural Business Conference 2015. School of Management, Steyr Campus, pages 315325 table 2. What was most striking is that these young people hardly define themselves via their I-shaped knowledge, but all take T-shaped skills as a base understanding for being the ideal employee. It is also noteworthy that the students hardly mention written communication skills and virtual / digital interaction is not mentioned at all. This strongly hints to the fact that both student groups connect interaction skills with spoken, face-to-face communication involving soft skills and a personality that supports interrelational behaviour. The so called soft skills form a larger part of interaction skills which supports our initial assumption that interaction skills would be narrower that soft skills but wider than communication skills. Another finding that turned out to be consistent with previous studies on ethnic socialisation of Germanic people (Schroll-Machl, 2013, Thomas et al, 2010) was the extent to which interaction skills were identified with being reliable, hard-working and context-sensitive. Being a self-starter and having a high level of motivation were found to be the key answers provided by Austrian ICT students. In contrast to what may be expected at a School of Informatics where conveying hard knowledge takes centre stage, the Austrian respondents displayed sharp awareness of team-playing skills and creative capacity. Finnish students were emphasizing more social skills and listening skills and much less personal and behavioral characteristics than the Austrians. This is in line with some crosscultural studies (cf. Lewis 1999) claiming that silence and listening skills are important for Finns and that they like to keep a “low profile” of themselves. The relatively low quotes for language and intercultural skills was surprising. However, the students may have thought that intercultural interaction is included in any human interaction per se. Deborah Tannen (1989) has also claimed that “all human communication is intercultural communication”.

Chydenius, T. & Gaisch, M. (2015). Worklife Interaction Skills: An exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry. In Proceedings Cross-Cultural Business Conference 2015. School of Management, Steyr Campus, pages 315325

Table 2: Student definitions for “Interaction skills”

Chydenius, T. & Gaisch, M. (2015). Worklife Interaction Skills: An exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry. In Proceedings Cross-Cultural Business Conference 2015. School of Management, Steyr Campus, pages 315325 4.3 Human resources managers The Austrian interviews were conducted with two C-level managers that work in the IT industry and frequently recruit IT personnel. Both drew a clear line in terms of job requirements by emphasising that interaction skills are a nice-to-have, but not necessarily a prerequisite for all IT-related professions. When working as a programmer, there was no perceived need to be a good communicator; it was even stated that introverted persons were happily coding in their remote offices without too much interaction at all. What became apparent though is that in order to get promoted and work in different fields of area, such skills then became crucial enablers or blockers. It was clearly stated that soft knowledge was a gate-opener for promotion and heightened responsibility that goes beyond the internalised hard expert field. In view of the globalisation in general, and the interconnected world of ICT in particular, soft skills in the form of T-shaped expertise such as conflict management, communication skills and intercultural competence were perceived to grow in significance. What was found to be most striking in their answers was their perceived inherent job portfolio according to which especially hard skills such as programming languages, ERP systems and network knowledge appeared to be worth mentioning whereas soft skills were taken-for-granted and only noteworthy upon specific request. On this note, it was remarkable that although softer skills were perceived as crucial, they were not explicitly stated or talked about. Interestingly, the longer the managers lingered on the topic at hand and the more they engaged in reflective practice, the more they became aware of the importance of personal qualities such as dedication, motivation, team spirit and time and conflict management. The Finnish employers consisted of two HR directors (respondents 1 and 3) and a Helpdesk Team Manager (R2). They all considered interaction skills as being a pivotal skills set for succeeding in various ICT positions. However, their definition of “worklife interaction skills” was much more restricted than the one provided by the Finnish students. Interestingly, they tended to equal them mainly with professional written and spoken communication skills. Yet, they also stressed the ability for genuine two-way interaction, listening skills and situational adroitness in order to put things in the right perspective. The ability to cope with stress, good manners, being social and a self-starter and adopting a positive attitude were additionally mentioned. The skills required from ICT employees were not substantively different from other professional groups apart from a few noteworthy comments: Firstly, problem solving skills were emphasized: “Our IT helpdesk needs to constantly solve problems and find solutions for them. They need to be able to ask right questions. This is very problem focused work ” (R2). Secondly, the global characteristic of ICT jobs were stressed: “In ICT field language and especially fluent English skills are extremely important. The whole working environment is global, networks global. The interaction is very much interculturally influenced “ (R1). Finally, being able to make the ICT concepts and

language understandable for lay people was emphasised both in written documentation as in spoken communication, with a slight emphasis towards written communication. “In an ICT specialist’s role the communication may be a little bit more towards written communication. One needs to be able to write a lot of documentation such as project plans, testing plans, reports etc. “ (R1)

It came to the fore that Finnish ICT graduates possess the required skills to some extent. However, they were found to predominantly lack skills in spoken and effective communicativeness, especially when it comes to communicating their competence in recruitment situations: “ If I compare our ICT recruitees with other fields’ recruitees, it is really difficult for the ICT fellows

Chydenius, T. & Gaisch, M. (2015). Worklife Interaction Skills: An exploration of definitional and functional perspectives within the Austrian and Finnish ICT industry. In Proceedings Cross-Cultural Business Conference 2015. School of Management, Steyr Campus, pages 315325 to properly describe their competence and skills. It’s like “digging it out with a stick” (R3). The biggest

development needs were mentioned to be in spoken communication. As to the assumption that certain types of ICT workers like programmers or coders would not need any communication, it was dispelled: “There are no isolated” researcher’s chambers” in ICT companies. The importance of interaction skills has grown immensely. Nobody codes alone any longer (R1). “Only if the guy is really, really top coder one might accept a more edgy personality but then he really needs to be exceptionally good at what he does” (R3).

The constant and permanent need for developing worklife interaction skills were emphasized by one senior employer representative: “- - I want to add that one should add more of these skills to ICT curricula. It is critical for becoming employed. Since the work life is under constant change nowadays, there are no permanent work places. ICT guys, too, need to buy their jobs again and again in new internal hierarchies, with new supervisors or in new companies. One needs to be able to convince and build trust over and over again. It could be considered as a mini-recruitment interview that is conducted sometimes several times a year.” (R1).

5

DISCUSSION AND LIMITATIONS

The study revealed the difficulty in defining this multi-faceted term and laid bare the variety of characteristics packed under the concept of “worklife interaction skills”. Initially, this term was believed to encompass skills that could be systematically developed during ICT Bachelor studies. However, it seems that students have similar challenges in defining this concept which may reflect the lack of a systematic terminological and conceptual development of this broad skillset area. Most spoken communication needs at work were found to be informal in nature (Scollon, Scollon & Jones 2012). In this sense, the interviewed students provided answers that were close to reality by including an array of characteristics required in real-time informal interactions. In a similar vein, this was also noted by the employers who underlined the need to develop spoken communication skills. What stuck out was that the high percentage of male employees was found to impact the field’s overall communication characteristics. As one of the recruiter mentioned: “I find it im-

portant that the number of girls in the ICT field would be increased. They usually possess better interaction skills so their competence could increase the quality [of communication] in general”. On the basis of a comparative cross-cultural analysis it could be found that while the Finnish participants tended to focus more on social skills in general, and listening skills in particular, their Austrian counterparts rated behavioural and personal skills much higher on the perceived recruitment agenda. This perception could be confirmed by both the job ad investigation and the subsequent interviews with the ICT seniors. Interestingly, it came to the fore that the Finnish employers considered interaction skills as a major asset in all ICT-related professions while the Austrian recruiters drew a clear line between programmers that are needed for producing codes and those IT experts that require a skillset that goes beyond their narrow expertise. In this context, it was stated that soft knowledge is likely to be a vital gate-opener for a higher paid job, one that requires assuming more responsibility in a wider field of activity. While the small sample size has been identified as a limitation, it needs to be stressed though that the qualitative focus of this study was clearly to get some in-depth understanding of the issue at hand and not to replicate the findings on a larger scale.

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