Mandatory Soft Skills Courses Really Work, Landmark Study of Spanish and Mexican Universities Finds

For decades, universities have paid lip service to the idea that graduates need more than technical knowledge. Mission statements brim with promises of holistic education, yet most degree programs still devote the overwhelming majority of classroom hours to hard skills, leaving communication, self-awareness and teamwork to be picked up incidentally, if at all. Now, one of the first rigorous evaluations of its kind suggests that when universities take soft skills seriously enough to make them compulsory, measurable change follows. A new study published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research examined more than 1,300 students at two private universities, one in Spain and one in Mexico, and found that purpose-built courses significantly boosted students’ self-perceived development of transversal competencies, with the strongest gains appearing in the intrapersonal domain.

The research, led by Paula Crespí of the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid together with colleagues at that institution and the Universidad Anáhuac Querétaro in Mexico, is notable precisely because such programs are so rare. A survey of 86 Spanish universities revealed that only 30 offer specific courses in soft skills or generic competencies, and most of those are optional, awarded-degree add-ons or postgraduate offerings rather than compulsory elements of a bachelor’s degree. In Mexico, an analysis of the ten largest universities in one major city found that only six offered such subjects at all. Against that backdrop, the two institutions studied here stand out: at both, every undergraduate, regardless of faculty, must complete courses designed specifically to cultivate intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies.

The Spanish case centered on a first-year mandatory course called Personal Skills and Competencies, taught across all 21 degree programs at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, a Madrid institution founded in 1993 with roughly 20,000 students. The course pushes students to think about personal fulfillment in its personal, social, academic and professional dimensions, combining classroom work with six one-hour, face-to-face mentoring sessions. Its methodology is experiential, drawing on project-based learning and the creation of a personal development plan. The Mexican case was more elaborate. At the Universidad Anáhuac Querétaro, founded in 2006 and part of an eight-institution network, first-year students take University Formation A, which guides them through an exploration of their identity, values and motivations, alongside Leadership and Personal Development. Second-year students then take University Formation B, which emphasizes emotional intelligence and community engagement, plus Leadership and High-performing Teams, which targets collaboration skills directly. Both Mexican courses embed five half-hour individual mentoring sessions into the semester.

What unites all five courses is a commitment to experiential learning in the tradition described by David Kolb, in which students learn by doing, reflecting and iterating, supported by continuous assessment rather than a single high-stakes exam. This methodological choice matters. The literature on soft skills development identifies a wide menu of possible approaches, from hackathons and role-playing to game-based learning, coaching and student-led initiatives such as clubs and associations. But the authors argue that compulsory, purpose-designed curricular subjects remain the least common and least studied option, despite being the approach most likely to reach every student rather than a self-selected minority.

To measure whether these courses actually work, the team ran three quasi-experimental studies during the 2022–23 academic year: one at the Spanish university tracking the first-year course, and two at the Mexican university, one for each year of the program. In total, 1,353 students participated, 675 in Spain and 678 in Mexico. Each study used a pretest/post-test design without a control group, administering a validated instrument called the Basic Generic Competencies Questionnaire immediately before and after each course. The questionnaire contains 36 items organized into two broad dimensions. The intrapersonal dimension covers introspection, including self-awareness, self-acceptance and self-management, and personal development, including the search for meaning in life, orientation to excellence and proactivity. The interpersonal dimension covers teamwork, spanning cooperative work, work environment management and orientation toward results, and effective communication, spanning verbal, paraverbal and non-verbal communication. Each item is rated on a six-point scale, a choice made deliberately to avoid central tendency bias. The instrument showed excellent internal consistency of 0.94 overall.

The statistical analysis relied on Student’s t-test for related samples to compare initial and final scores, an approach justified by the large sample size despite non-normal score distributions. Differences by gender were tested with t-tests for independent samples, and differences between faculties with one-way analysis of variance, with effect sizes quantified using Cohen’s d and the eta-squared index. In the Spanish study, students reported significant improvements in both dimensions, but the effect was clearly larger for intrapersonal competencies. Every subdimension improved significantly except teamwork, which showed no change, and within it the specific competence of cooperative work even declined slightly. The standout result was self-awareness, with a medium effect size of 0.580, alongside a notable gain in the broader introspection subdimension.

The Mexican results told a broadly consistent story. In the first-year study, both dimensions improved significantly with similar effect sizes, and the strongest gains appeared in verbal and non-verbal communication, self-awareness and orientation to excellence. Cooperative work and work environment management again failed to improve significantly, which the authors consider unsurprising given that these competencies were not the explicit focus of the first-year courses. In the second-year study, only the intrapersonal dimension improved significantly, driven by the personal development subdimension, while the teamwork hypothesis was not confirmed. Across all three studies, gender made no significant difference to outcomes, and faculty effects were either small or absent, suggesting the programs work reasonably uniformly across disciplines, from engineering to health sciences.

The stubborn weakness of teamwork is one of the study’s most intriguing findings, and the authors offer a psychologically plausible explanation. First-year students, they suggest, tend to equate group work with teamwork, assuming that dividing up tasks is all there is to collaboration. This inflates their initial self-perception, leaving little apparent room for improvement. As the courses unpack what genuine teamwork actually requires, coordinating, managing conflict, orienting collectively toward results, students’ self-assessments become more realistic and can even dip. In other words, the apparent decline in cooperative work may reflect a correction of overconfidence rather than a deterioration of skill, a distinction the authors say can only be resolved by contrasting self-perception with actual performance on collaborative tasks.

Why did intrapersonal competencies benefit more consistently than interpersonal ones? The authors point to the individual mentoring sessions woven through every course. One-on-one mentoring, they argue, is inherently suited to developing self-knowledge, self-management and personal direction, complementing the experiential classroom work. This aligns with earlier findings by the same team on the impact of mentoring on transversal competence development, and with broader meta-analytic evidence on the effectiveness of structured character and competence education programs. The practical implication is concrete: universities designing soft skills courses should treat mentoring not as an optional enrichment but as a core component of the pedagogical model.

The study’s conclusions come with candid caveats. The quasi-experimental design lacked a control group, so factors such as prior experience, motivation or general maturation over an academic year cannot be ruled out as alternative explanations. The measurement relied entirely on self-report, which is an indirect indicator of actual competence, associated with self-efficacy rather than demonstrated performance. Sample attrition between measurements also forced the abandonment of one faculty-level hypothesis. The authors recommend that future work adopt mixed methods, longitudinal designs tracking whether gains persist across a degree program, control groups for stronger causal inference, and performance-based assessments that observe behavior directly. Still, as a first empirical test of a rarely studied curricular model, the message is striking: compulsory courses built specifically for soft skills, taught through experiential methods and reinforced by individual mentoring, can move the needle on the competencies that employers increasingly prize and that traditional curricula so often neglect. For universities still treating soft skills as an afterthought, the evidence now suggests there is a tested blueprint waiting to be adopted.

Subject of Research: Effectiveness of compulsory soft skills curricular courses on university students' transversal competencies in Spain and Mexico

Article Title: Effectiveness of soft skills curricular subjects: a case study of two universities, Spain and Mexico

Article References: Crespí, P., López González, J., Rodríguez-Barroso, J., & Virués, R. (2025). Effectiveness of soft skills curricular subjects: a case study of two universities, Spain and Mexico. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 14(1), Article 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-025-00035-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-025-00035-y

Keywords: soft skills, higher education, transversal competencies, intrapersonal competencies, interpersonal competencies, mentoring, experiential learning, curriculum design, quasi-experimental study, Spain, Mexico, employability