LAHORE: The Government College University Lahore has initiated a series of life skills workshops that equip its students with the soft skills. The program has adopted three skills as its core focus: critical thinking, social interaction and emotional intelligence.

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The first workshop in the series was held here at GCU on the “Art of Conversation” that focuses on verbal and non-verbal communications, barriers in conversations, handling difficult situations and micro-skills of impressive conversation.

Addressing the opening ceremony of the workshop, Vice Chancellor Prof. Dr Asghar Zaidi said “we are equipping our students with the necessary skills to become highly competitive in the global market. When we discuss as to how to make our bright students better than the students at topmost universities of the world, I have identified one issue: lack of communication skills and that is the focus of the first workshop”

The Vice Chancellor said most GCU students came from a middle or lower-middle class where life skills were unfortunately ignored in their schooling. “It makes them socially awkward in modern academic and professional settings, so we will be making life skills workshops a a permanent feature of learning at GCU, often during the zero semester arrangements”.

The resource person of the workshops mentioned that our knowledge of particular field matters not more than 85 percent of our success depends on how we interact with others. “If we are knowledgeable but lack good communication skills, we will be merely technicians, managers and background workers. All good leaders have one thing in common, they communicate well with others. It’s a key to success”.

A GCU student told: “We are very much grateful to our VC for these workshops. Life skills make possible the understanding and exchange of ideas and thoughts. We will learn to empathize with others. Traditional teaching methods make students passive listeners. Even if they understand, they lack the skills to express themselves. These deficiencies hurt when we go in the market and see less knowledgeable persons excelling in professional fields”.