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

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