Philosophy Classes May Quietly Build the Soft Skills Employers Want Most

A required course that many students treat as a box-ticking exercise may be doing more for their careers than anyone realized. A new study of 527 Vietnamese undergraduates across six universities finds that Marxist-Leninist philosophy, a mandatory subject in Vietnam’s higher education curriculum, is associated with measurable gains in critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and problem-solving, the very soft skills that employers consistently rank as decisive in the labor market. The research, published in SN Social Sciences, challenges the assumption that abstract political philosophy courses are irrelevant to practical career preparation.

The research team, led by Thao Van Vi of the East Asia University of Technology in Hanoi together with colleagues from Hanoi National University of Education, the University of Danang, and Vinh University, set out to test a proposition that sounds almost paradoxical: that a nineteenth-century philosophical framework could serve as a training ground for twenty-first-century workplace competencies. Their survey-based study measured how students perceived the philosophy course and whether those perceptions correlated with self-reported soft skill development, using regression analysis to isolate which factors mattered most.

The headline finding is striking in its simplicity. Students’ positive perceptions of the philosophy course had the strongest statistical impact on their soft skills development of any factor examined. In other words, when students engaged with the material rather than merely enduring it, the course appeared to function as a genuine skills incubator. The authors argue that this effect is not automatic but conditional: the benefits emerge primarily when the philosophy is taught through interactive methods and connected to practical, real-world problems rather than delivered as rote memorization of doctrine.

Why would dialectical materialism and historical materialism build communication and teamwork skills? The mechanism, according to the study’s theoretical framework, lies in the structure of philosophical reasoning itself. Marxist-Leninist philosophy trains students to analyze contradictions, examine phenomena in their interconnections, and trace how opposing forces interact to produce change. These are, in essence, the cognitive operations underlying problem-solving: identifying tensions in a situation, weighing competing explanations, and synthesizing a coherent resolution. When classroom discussion requires students to defend an analysis of social phenomena, they practice argumentation, listening, and collaborative reasoning simultaneously.

The study situates itself within a substantial body of evidence on the economic value of soft skills. Economists including James Heckman have demonstrated that character and interpersonal skills predict labor market outcomes at least as strongly as cognitive test scores, and surveys of executives routinely place communication, teamwork, and adaptability at the top of hiring priorities. In Vietnam, where the economy is deeply integrated into global supply chains and graduates compete in an increasingly internationalized labor market, the stakes of soft skills development are particularly high. Universities have responded with dedicated employability programs, but the new research suggests that existing mandatory coursework may be an underused resource.

Methodologically, the researchers administered a structured questionnaire to 527 students drawn from six Vietnamese universities, using Likert-scale items to gauge both perceptions of the philosophy course and self-assessed competencies across the four target skill domains. The team validated their instruments through standard psychometric procedures, including factor analysis to confirm that the measured constructs were statistically distinct, and applied multiple regression to determine the relative contribution of course perceptions to skills outcomes while controlling for other variables. The authors report that the data supporting the study’s conclusions are fully provided in the article, with additional data available on reasonable request.

The findings align with a growing Vietnamese literature on critical thinking in higher education. Prior studies at the University of Danang and Ho Chi Minh City Open University have explored how philosophy teaching can cultivate creative and critical reasoning, while other Vietnamese research has documented persistent gaps between students’ critical thinking capacities and the demands of argumentative writing and professional practice. The new study extends this work by quantifying the relationship between a specific mandatory course and a broad portfolio of soft skills, rather than focusing on critical thinking alone.

The pedagogical implications are where the research becomes most actionable. The authors contend that the traditional lecture-heavy format common in philosophy courses across Vietnam risks squandering the subject’s potential. Interactive approaches, including structured debate, case-based discussion, and group projects that apply dialectical analysis to contemporary social and economic questions, appear to be the pathway through which the course translates theory into transferable skills. This mirrors international findings in the scholarship of teaching and learning, which consistently show that active learning formats outperform passive transmission for developing higher-order reasoning and interpersonal competencies.

There are, of course, limits to what a cross-sectional survey can establish. The study measures perceptions and self-reports rather than independently assessed skill performance, and correlation through regression analysis cannot fully rule out the possibility that students who already possess stronger soft skills simply view their philosophy courses more favorably. Longitudinal designs tracking students from enrollment through graduation, and employer evaluations of graduate performance, would be needed to confirm the causal pathway the authors propose. The research ethics were validated by the Department of Scientific Research at the East Asia University of Technology, with anonymous participation and voluntary withdrawal guaranteed for all respondents.

Even with those caveats, the study carries a provocative message for educators well beyond Vietnam. It suggests that the content of a curriculum matters less than how it is taught, and that even courses perceived as ideological or antiquated can become engines of transferable competence when instructors connect abstract frameworks to lived experience. As universities worldwide scramble to embed employability skills across their programs, the Vietnamese case offers a reminder that the most unlikely courses may already be teaching exactly what the modern workplace demands, provided students are invited to think rather than merely memorize.

Subject of Research: The role of Marxist-Leninist philosophy education in developing soft skills among Vietnamese university students

Article Title: Marxist-Leninist philosophy – the foundation for developing soft skills: a case study of Vietnamese students

Article References: Tuyet, M. T., Hai, H. T., Thi, M. A. N. T. K., & Van Vi, T. (2026). Marxist-Leninist philosophy – the foundation for developing soft skills: a case study of Vietnamese students. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 512. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01795-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01795-w

Keywords: Marxist-Leninist philosophy, soft skills, critical thinking, communication skills, teamwork, problem-solving, Vietnamese higher education, regression analysis, employability, philosophy of education, interactive teaching, survey research