Developing Soft Skills for the Work Readiness in Industry of Vocational High School Students

Abstrak / Ringkasan

The development of the vocational high school (VHS) students’ soft skills is urgent to prepare the graduates to
be ready in the field of work which always changes and varies. This study aims to: (1) find out a model for
developing the soft skills of the VHS students to make them possess work readiness in industry; (2) investigate
the manifest capability of the soft skills development to reflect students’ work readiness; and (3) investigate the
contributions of the soft skills development to the work readiness in industry of the VHS students.
This study was a research and development study consisting of (1) a model design through FGD, Delphi, and
expert validation; and (3) model tryouts through an individual tryout, a small-scale tryout, a large-scale tryout.
The research subjects comprised VHS students in the Province of Yogyakarta Special Territory. The model fit
was analyzed using the analysis of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) by means of the LISREL 8.71
software.
The results of the study are as follows: (1) a development model for VHS students’ soft skills can be made
based on the high level of agreement among experts, the instruments’ high readability for students, the good
implementation of the learning scenario that satisfies the dimensions of the soft skills development; (2) the
effectiveness of the model based on the results of the measurement of the exogenous latent variables shows a
high category in work motivation (81.15%), work commitment (65.57%), and work appreciation (62.30%),
while work ethos (67.21%) and work culture (52.46%) are in the moderate category; all work readiness aspects
of 2.89 are strong enough as a work readiness indication; and (3) the contribution of the soft skills development
to VHS students’ work readiness in industry is 67.8%, shown by the value of t-val (0.824) which is higher than ttable
1.96, which is significant. Therefore, the soft skills development model is capable of equipping VHS
graduates with work readiness in industry.

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